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Negro Neighbors 

BOND AND FREE 



LESSONS IN 



History and Humanity 



BY 



PHILA M. WHIPPLE 



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Woman^s American Baptist Home Mission Society y 
510 Tremont Temple y Boston y Mass. 



1907 



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Sun Printing Company. 
Pittsfield, Mass. 








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Contents 



LESSON I. Page 

Bondage Enforced, .... 5 



LESSON IL 

Freedom Achieved, . . . -33 



LESSON IIL 

Development Begun, . . . - ^7 



LESSON IV. 

Missions Multiplied, .... 105 




Q 



Lesson I 
Bondage Enforced 



ANCIENT SLAVERY 



"Whatever day 
Makes man a slave takes half his worth away." 

Its Far back to the earliest pages of the world's 

Origin, history must we turn to find the day when 
first a man was made a slave, — the property 
of his fellow-man. Then, vastly more than now, life 
was a struggle, — a struggle with nature and its laws, 
with wild beasts and savage men, — a struggle for 
food and raiment, for house and land, often for mere 
existence and the right to live. In the midst of these 
primitive strugglers stalked two grim figures. Want 
and War^ bringing men into bondage, and founding 
the institution of slavery. Hunger and cold, famine 
and privation were the stern agents of Want, causing 
many a man, a family, or even an entire tribe or clan, 
to accept terms of service from those who could and 
would supply their urgent needs. Even more pow- 
erful was War, with his long train of foreign captives, 
forced to enter into subjection to the conqueror. Even 
the savages of that early period found it more profit- 
able to enslave their captives than to massacre them, 
and the custom became widely prevalent in the ancient 
world. 

Among Oriental AH the ancient oriental nations of 
Nations. which we have any record had their 

slaves, and some of the greatest 
material works of antiquity were accomplished by 



€ LESSON I 

them. By means of slaves, agriculture was carried 
on ; the industrial arts were practised ; and, because of 
their hard labor, leisure was given to priests and 
scribes, philosophers and writers, to work out their 
plans for the intellectual development of the race. In 
Assyria, recently discovered sculptures show great 
masses of slaves — the conquest of war — engaged in 
dragging colossal monuments into position. In Egypt, 
it was slave labor that built the pyramids, and reared 
the sphinx of Ghizeh ; and Egyptian slaves performed 
many acts of social and artistic service, as represented 
on their monuments. There was slave-trading, too, 
and the Phenicians shared with the Philistines the 
unhappy reputation of being the chief slave-traders 
of antiquity. Even among the Hebrews, slaves were 
held ; some, members of their own nation who had sold 
themselves on account of debts or poverty, — others, 
foreigners who had become captives in time of war. 

HebreTf Much of the Mosaic Law is concerned 

Legislation, with the treatment of bond-servants ; 
and from both law and history it is evi- 
dent that slavery among the Hebrews was an institu- 
tion much more humane and considerate than among 
other Eastern nations of the olden time, or those mod- 
ern nations that have practised it. Much emphasis was 
placed upon the sacredness of human life and liberty ; 
masters must treat their slaves with kindness and with 
justice as tho they were brethren; suitable remunera- 
tion must be given for their services, and in the seventh 
year came their release; while every fifty years there 
was, besides, a general emancipation of Hebrew slaves, 
a veritable Year of Jubilee. No Fugitive Slave Law 
defaced the Mosaic Statute book, but instead a law 
which said: 



BONDAGE ENFORCED 7 

"Thou Shalt not deliver up a slave to his master, 
who escapes to thee from his master. With thee 
shall he abide in thy midst in the place that he 
chooses, in any one of thy cities that he likes." 
— (Deut. 23: 15, 16.) 

Some distinction there was between the native and the 
foreign slave, in favor of the native; but the latter 
was urged to become a proselyte, to become a part of 
the Hebrew religious community, and so to share in 
its protection. Many a slave attained a high position 
in his master's household, and he might even become 
his heir. The important place held by Eliezer in the 
family of Abraham was paralleled in later times by 
the fate of Joseph, the captive Hebrew, who became 
the prime minister of Pharaoh. In a word, the pur- 
pose of the Hebrew legislation regarding a system 
existing centuries before the Exodus and the giving 
of the Law, was to diminish its evils, and limit its 
duration. Had this spirit prevailed in other lands and 
other times, the face of history had been changed. 

In Ancient Among the Greeks, the practise of slavery 
Greece. was so ancient that its origin cannot be 

traced. Even their greatest philosophers 
and moralists saw in it no moral wrong, but regarded 
it as a necessity of nature. Aristotle divided all man- 
kind into two classes, — freemen, and slaz'cs by nature ; 
and Plato wished only that no Greeks should be made 
slaves. Besides those taken captive in war, and those 
enslaved by their creditors for debt, the slave-markets 
were supplied by pirates whose trade was not then 
considered illegal and dishonorable. The Greek deal- 
ers bought large numbers of human beings at the 
markets held in the towns on the coast of the Black 
Sea, and the Asiatic side of the Grecian Archipelago; 
then put them up for sale at home. In Athens, there 



S LESSON I 

were special markets held for this purpose on the 
first day of every month, and the number of slaves 
owned in all parts of Greece was enormous. It was 
a sign of extreme poverty to own no slaves at all, and 
their number probably exceeded that of the free popu- 
lation. Laws and customs differed in different states, 
but in many respects the lot of the slave was hard and 
unhappy. His master might throw him into chains, 
put him in the stocks, condemn him to the most vio- 
lent labor, leave him without food, brand him, punish 
him with stripes, — but in Athens, at least, he was for- 
bidden to kill him. Still, it was possible for some 
slaves to earn large sums of money, enjoy a fair share 
of legal protection, and purchase their freedom, should 
their owners consent. So that, according to Demos- 
thenes, a slave at Athens was better off than a free 
citizen in many other countries. 

In Here, too, the custom was widely prevalent, 

Rome, and under the Roman Empire, it is said to 
have been carried to an excess never known 
elsewhere, before or since. But the conditions dif- 
fered somewhat from those in Greece. The Romans 
believed that all men were free by natural law; but 
that slavery, tho contrary to such law, was justified by 
the law of nations, when a captive was preserved in- 
stead of being slain. From this custom comes the 
Latin word for slave, servus, contracted from servatus 
— preserved. Then, when a freeman sold himself for 
debt, his enslavement was justified by civil law. How 
different was the Roman from the Hebrew estimate 
of human life, is shown all too vividly in the customs 
of the gladiatorial combats ; in the exposure of old and 
useless slaves on an island of the Tiber, there to die 
of hunger; and in conduct like that of one Pollio, 



BONDAGE ENFORCED 9 

who, in the polite age of Augustus, was accustomed 
to fling such slaves as displeased him into his fish 
ponds, to please his lampreys. When complaint was 
made to the Emperor, no severer punishment was im- 
posed upon the noble (?) criminal than the destruc- 
tion of his ponds. But later, such cruelty was some- 
what restrained by law, and the killing of a slave was 
accounted murder, but the harboring of a runaway 
slave was illegal. At first, the cultivation of the soil 
was almost entirely given over to slaves ; then they 
became personal attendants upon their masters ; later, 
they were employed in the mechanical arts, about the 
amphitheatre, and then in trade, when it became pos- 
sible for them to hold property of their own, and per- 
haps purchase their freedom. There were various 
ways in which a slave might be set at liberty, but this 
power was restricted by law. Among captives set 
free, both in Greece and Rome, was often a slave far 
superior to his master, and the names of Esop and 
Epictetus have shed luster upon a condition of bond- 
age, destined to be for them of short duration, an 
earnest of the coming emancipation of their race. 

The Teachings The new religion did not at once 
of Christianity, break the fetters which long ages of 

practise had so firmly forged, but it 
introduced principles which, once adopted, and devel- 
oped to their perfect application, were powerful to 
snap the chains of slavery, and restore men to their 
natural rights of freedom. The new idea of human 
duties and relationships taught by the Founder of 
Christianity ; the lessons of love and brotherhood, and 
common relations of all men to the life and liberty 
of the Gospel ; the explicit injunctions of Paul, the 
chief Apostle, concerning the mutual duties of bond- 



10 LESSON I 

servants and their masters ; — all these were the spirit- 
ual influences permeating the Christian Church, and 
thru it, the world. Christianity never, in the early 
ag*es, denounced slavery as a crime, never advised 
slaves to rise and throw off the yoke, nor definitely 
commanded masters to liberate their slaves ; but it 
taught patience and obedience to the one, and to the 
other, kindness and forbearance. Within the church, 
the brotherhood of man was recognized, master and 
slave were absolutely equal, and Paul could say: 

"There is neither slave nor free, for, ye are all 
one in Christ Jesus." 

The poor, unhappy bondsmen of Greek and Roman 
society had restored to them their rights of manhood, 
and their external condition was gradually improved. 
The church excommunicated such slave-holders as put 
their slaves to death without warrant from the judge, 
and even Roman laws were modified in favor of the 
slave. Still, the number of those held in bondage in- 
creased, as multitudes were brought in by the barbaric 
invaders of the Empire ; and our modern word slave 
bears witness to the fact that great numbers of these 
captives were Slars, tribes dwelling at first between 
the Vistula and Dnieper rivers, but spreading west- 
ward as their primitive home became too narrow for 
their rapid increase. Six centuries of conflict between 
Christianity and the institution of slavery in the Ro- 
man Empire saw the latter tottering to its fall, only 
to be succeeded thruout all medieval Europe by the 
almost equally degrading bondage of serfdom. But 
the leaven of liberty was at work, surely if slowly, 
and after eighteen centuries of influence, emancipation 
was a fact in all Christian European countries ; and in 
this twentieth century, it still must work to abolish 



BONDAGE ENFORCED 11 

those lingering remnants of a traffic contrary to all 
the laws of humanity and of God. 

MODERN NEGRO SLAVERY 

Its Beg-inning "African slavery is the oldest of all 
in Europe. known systems of chattelism, and as 

the earliest records show, was uni- 
versal in the Dark Continent. From the dawn of 
commerce and civilization, slaves were its chief 
commodity of exchange with foreign peoples. 
India, Persia, Babylon, Arabia, Phenicia, the 
Hebrews, Greece, and Rome traflBcked in Negro 
slaves, exchanging their spices, wine, silks, 
jewels, linen, and tapestry for sable bondmen. 
But in the last four centuries, the Arabs and the 
Portuguese have been the foreign slave factors 
of Africa, the former supplying the Eastern, and 
the latter the Western slave markets of the world, 
which, until slavery was abolished in our hemi- 
sphere, consisted of North, South, and Central 
America, as well as the West Indian Islands." 

This is the statement of an American historian, him- 
self of African descent, and it furnishes the connect- 
ing link between the ancient and the modern, and in- 
troduces the Portuguese as the earliest European 
nation to engage in the capture and the sale of their 
Brothers in Black. 

Prince Henry's In the days of the Navigator Prince, 
Agency. Cape Bojador, the bulging cape, just 

beyond the Canaries, was the south- 
ernmost point of Christian knowledge ; and strange 
and childish notions filled the minds of mariners and 
landsmen alike. The sailors believed that any Chris- 
tian venturing beyond this cape would be turned into 
a black, God's punishment on his curious and insolent 
prying. The medieval maps were marvels of super- 
stitious imagination and fear, representing the African 



12 LESSON I 

coast as fringed with sea-monsters and serpent rocks, 
and over the waters frightful spirit hands, raised to 
seize the first human victims wlio should venture into 
this Satanic realm. But Henry of Portugal roused 
his captains to discredit these idle tales, and urged 
them in these words to pass beyond the dreaded cape : 

"Go out again and lieed them not, for by God's 
help, fame and profit must come from your voy- 
age, if you will but persevere." 

And fame and profit came. 

The First In 1434, one of his caravels doubled Bo- 
Captives, jador, and the following year efforts were 
made to explore the land and obey Henry's 
injunction to bring home at least one native. The 
first efforts failed, but in 1441 Antam Gonsalvez, 
Master of the Robes to Prince Henry, was sent out 
with a vessel to load it with "sea-wolves" ; but instead 
he captured some Moors, hoping to please his royal 
master by taking home ''some of the language of that 
country." In 1442, these Moors offered their captor 
some black slaves in ransom for themselves, if they 
were taken back to their own country. This the Prince 
urged Gonsalvez to do, for the sake of gaining souls, 
having more faith in the conversion of the Negroes 
than of the Moors. When the Master of the Robes 
made terms with his first captives and restored them 
to their homes, he is said to have received in exchange 
for two Moors, some gold dust, a target of buffalo 
hide, some ostrich eggs, and ten black slaves, the first 
to make their appearance in the Spanish Peninsula, 
where they aroused great admiration because of their 
color. Then began the second great period of slavery. 
The old pagan institution had become practically ex- 



BONDAGE ENFORCED 13 

tinct, and this new phase was marked by a character 
purely commercial. The slave was no longer a pris- 
oner of war, no longer a captive of debt or poverty, 
but an object of commerce, a creature to be sought for, 
to be produced, and to be sold. More momentous 
than all that had preceded is the history of the last 
four centuries. 

SLAVERY m SPAiVISH AMERICA 

The Spanish Could Prince Henry have foreseen the 
Trade. outcome of this trade in human souls, 

the far-reaching results to two conti- 
nents and two races, we may well believe that his 
righteous soul would have been vexed within him ; for 
history credits him with kindness and fair treatment, 
with genuine piety and earnest zeal for the increase of 
the church. Hating the Moslem infidels with a bitter 
hatred, he believed it was better for a Negro to be a 
slave in the Christian faith than a Mohammedan in 
freedom, and his was not the selfish pleasure of a 
slave trader in making gain, or inflicting injury. 
Others had the commercial instinct, however, and the 
trade went on ; tho, after a time, the importation of 
human beings by the Portuguese languished until after 
the discovery of America. Even then, it was the part 
of Spain and not of Portugal to bring upon herself 
the dire disgrace of introducing slavery into the New 
World. One of Spain's historians even claims for her 
a trade in Negro slaves earlier than that of the Por- 
tuguese ; but however that may be, it is certain that 
long before Columbus sailed away from Palos, on his 
memorable voyage of discovery, the sale of gold-dust 
and captives from the west coast of Africa was carried 
on in Andalusia, and "abounded in the city of Seville." 



14 LESSON I 

Enslavement Like Prince Henry and the Catholic 

of the Indians, sovereigns, Ferdinand and Isabella, 

Columbus was possessed by a strong 
desire to bring men — all men, white, black or red, to 
the faith of the Holy Catholic Church, as his own de- 
scription of the first Indian he met clearly illustrates. 

"Because they had much friendship for us, and 
because I knew they were people that would de- 
liver themselves better to the Christian faith, and 
be converted more through love than by force, I 
gave some of them coloured caps and some strings 
of glass beads for their neck, and many other 
things of little value, with which they were de- 
lighted, ani were so entirely ours that it was a 
marvel to see. They ought to make faithful ser- 
vants and of good understanding, for I see that 
very quickly they repeat all that is said to them; 
and I believe they would easily be converted to 
Christianity, for it appeared to me that they had 
no creed." 

Strangely in contrast with an honest missionary pur- 
pose was the method suggested and practised in carry- 
ing it out. On Columbus's second visit to the New 
World, after finding the little colony left on His- 
paniola entirely destroyed, he sent messages back to 
Spain by one Antonio de Torres, who was to inform 
their royal highnesses that he (Columbus) had "sent 
home some Indians from the Cannibal Islands as 
slaves, to be taught Castilian and to serve afterwards 
as interpreters, so that the work of conversion might 
go on." He advised, too, that the more of them that 
could be taken the better, and distinctly proposed the 
establishment of the slave-trade. But the Monarchs 
rejected the proposal, tho, curiously enough, the very 
ships that brought their reply, begging Columbus to 
seek some other way to Christianity than thru slavery, 
even for man-eating Caribs, went back to Spain loaded 
with slaves taken from among the wild inhabitants of 



BONDAGE ENFORCED li 

Hispaniola. So, in spite of the royal protest, the trade 
went on ; Columbus made war, took captives, sent 
them to Spain, devised plans of barter and exchange, 
and developed the commercial cunning of the slave- 
trader, without, perhaps, losing the religious instinct 
for conversion, so-called. 

Substitution The large numbers of Indians sent to 

of the Negroes. Spain, killed by warfare, or by un- 
accustomed labors, privations, and 
diseases, so reduced the labor market, that Negroes 
were gradually introduced to supply it. Spanish 
slave holders, as they emigrated to the colonies, 
brought unauthorized their slaves with them, and the 
superior hardihood of the race, their ability to live in 
all climates, favored their further importation. In 
1 50 1, when Ovando was governor of the Indies, an 
edict of the King declared that Negro slaves "born in 
the power of Christians," were to be allowed to enter 
Hispaniola; and in this way the trade was established 
in the New World, by the royal ordinances of Spain. 
In two years the number was so great that the gov- 
ernor remonstrated, begging "that no Negro slaves 
should be sent to Hispaniola, for they fled amongst 
the Indians, and taught them bad customs, and never 
could be caught" ; and the pope — Leo X. — declared 
that "not the Christian religion only, but nature her- 
self cries out against the state of slavery." But the 
King continued to send them, and for a time the idle 
pretense of using them to assist in converting the 
infidel natives was maintained. Then the cultivation 
of sugar began, and this caused new demands 
for the labor of the hardy African, so that cov- 
etousness overcame any lingering scruples, and the 
traffic in slaves between Guinea and Hispaniola was 



16 LESSON I 

permitted by repeated royal orders. It is a curious 
coincidence that the very year (15 17) in which began 
the great Protestant Reformation in Germany, Las 
Casas, called "Protector of the Indians," returned 
from America to Spain to plead the cause of the fail- 
ing red men, and to urge a still more general employ- 
ment of the black men in their places. Then the Flem- 
ings longed for license to engage in the dishonorable 
business, and Charles V. granted them permission. 
Another coincidence, even more striking in its incon- 
sistency, is the fact that the same year in which the 
monarch sailed for Tunis to set free the Christian 
slaves of Africa captured by the Moors, he gave his 
legal sanction to the African slave trade, substituting 
the oppression of one race for that of another. One 
Spanish statesman saw in advance to what propor- 
tions this might grow, and the possibility of revolu- 
tion; and it is a logical coincidence that Hayti, the 
first place in the New World to receive Negro slaves, 
was the first to set the example of successful revolt 
and liberty. It was the slave trade which gave to the 
African race their inheritance in America, a gift 
which may be described in the quaint phrase of an early 
historian as "very mischievous to as remote a period 
in the history of the world as we can at all presume 
to foresee.'* 

English Five years from Columbus to Cabot, and 

Enterprise, then a long period of inactivity on the 
part of the English ! Many adventurers 
crossed the Atlantic and explored the coast, but as the 
excitement of novelty grew less, the voyages grew 
fewer and fewer, for there was little chance to con- 
quer, or to plunder from the Spaniards who were 
then on friendly terms with England; and the pope's 



BONDAGE ENFORCED 17 

division of all newly-discovered lands between Spain 
and Portugal could not be well contested by a country 
then Catholic itself. But with the increasing demand 
for Negro slave labor, English enterprise was to find 
an opening, and to Sir John Hawkins belongs the un- 
enviable distinction of first interesting his countrymen 
in the detestable traffic. The Spaniards themselves 
had no African settlements, but depended for their 
supplies upon the Portuguese, and French and Eng- 
lish adventurers. When the Brazilian plantations de- 
veloped so rapidly as to absorb the entire supply, the 
Spanish colonists were at a loss where to look for 
Negro helpers for themselves. When the French and 
English captains frequenting the Guinea coast realized 
this condition. Sir John Hawkins, who had from boy- 
hood been engaged in trade with Spain and the 
Canaries, determined to take a cargo of slaves to His- 
paniola. This he did in 1562, and his little fleet was 
the first English squadron to sail the West Indian 
seas. His ships returned to England, laden with 
sugar, ginger, and pearls ; and so pleased was his royal 
mistress, Elizabeth, that she deigned not only to pro- 
tect his second expedition, but to share its profits. The 
history of his first voyage to the Guinea coast reads 
like this, and the sad, laconic story was repeated in 
the later expeditions. 

"Master John Hawkins, coming upon the coast of 
Sierra Leone, staid for some time, and partly by 
the sword, and partly by other means, got into his 
possession three hundred Negroes at the least." 

What those other means may have been is only too 
evident from Hawkins's own account of his method. 
In one invasion, he acknowledges having set fire to a 
city of which the huts were covered with dry palm 
leaves, and so having seized two hundred and fifty 



18 LESSON I 

captives out of a population of 8000. A second voy- 
age to Africa followed in 1564, and a third was 
planned for 1566, but the Spanish King protested, for 
ail this trade in Spanish ports was as unlawful as it 
was unchristian. But by 1567, there was war between 
England and Spain, and Hawkins could carry out 
his plans without restraint ; and in the voyage of this 
year, he was joined by young Francis Drake, who 
wished to extend his knowledge and share in the gains 
of the traffic. Indeed, this trade with the Spanish 
settlements in both North and South America proved 
lucrative beyond all expectation, and for his exploits 
on the Guinea coast and his subsequent expeditions, 
Capt. Hawkins obtained from the English office of 
heraldry a coat-of-arms — ''a deuii-Moor in his proper 
colour^ bound with a cord" ; and the Queen of Eng- 
land shared his risks, his profits, and his crimes, and 
became ''a smuggler and a slave-merchant." Low in- 
deed was the prevailing sentiment in so-called Chris- 
tian countries, when such things could be ; and very 
slowly, tho not in vain, was the Christian leaven per- 
meating the whole mass of European humanity. 

IN COLONY AND STATE 

la the The first African slaves ever brought to the 
Soutli. mainland of North America were probably 
imported into Florida by the Spaniards late in 
the sixteenth century, but the first English colony to 
invest in the lives and labors of their black brothers 
was Virginia. It was a Dutch man-of-war, which 
entered the James River in August, 16 19, bringing 
twenty Negroes, who were purchased by the colonists, 
and with their children held in perpetual bondage, 
this latter condition marking the difference between 



BONDAGE ENFORCED 19 

the so-called "white slaves" of Virginia and the black. 
Had the trade remained with the Dutch, it would 
never have reached such great proportions as it at- 
tained in later years. Another nation was to foster 
the infamous traffic, and a clever invention to increase 
the demand. It is interesting to note in this connec- 
tion, that the second year following, 162 1, saw the be- 
ginning- of cotton culture in the United States. Then 
for the first time the seeds were planted, at whose 
"plentiful coming-up" both England and America re- 
joiced. Colonists from Virginia settled in North 
Carohna, and carried their slaves with them ; South 
Carolina received her share with the governor who 
came from the Barbadoes ; and altho Oglethorpe, the 
founder of the Georgia colony, held slavery to be a 
crime against the laws of God, and those of Engla:id, 
yet the colonists complaining of his prohibition hired 
slaves from South Carolina ; and soon ships sailed 
from Savannah for the coast of Africa, and Georgia, 
too, became a slave State. When the number of 
slaves seemed to increase too rapidly, some restrictions 
were imposed upon the traffic ; but always the English 
government resisted such restrictions, and one histor- 
ian of this sad business has written : 

"British avarice planted slavery in America; 
British legislation sanctioned and maintained it; 
British statesmen sustained and guarded it." 



Inyention of the In the vears preceding the Revolu- 
Cotton Gin. tion, the cultivation of rice, indigo, 

and tobacco became profitable 
sources of gain to the mother country, as well as to 
the colonists themselves, and the patient slaves toiling 
under the lash of cruel overseers were adding to the 



20 LESSON I 

wealth of their masters at home and abroad. But the 
culture of cotton had up to this time been of compara- 
tively little profit until Eli Whitney, in 1793, perfected 
the cotton gin, — a machine for separating the fibre of 
cotton from the seed. New demands for this fibre had 
arisen in England, where the introduction of the fac- 
tory system was just then made possible by the use of 
steam-power, and the invention of spinning and weav- 
ing machines. Now, with the help of Whitney's 
'*gin," southern planters could supply the demand, and 
the cultivation of cotton spread all thru the States and 
Territories of the warmer regions of the South, as 
rapidly as slaves could be procured for new planta- 
tions. Between the years of 1793 and 1808, it is esti- 
mated that no fewer than half a million were imported 
into the United States, five-sevenths as many in those 
fifteen years as the whole number in the States in 
1790. The profit was immense, and a slave became 
doubly valuable. All hope of a gradual extinction of 
the system of slave labor, held by many even in the 
South, by men like Washington and Jefferson, seemed 
lost, and since the legal importation of slaves could 
not endure for many more years, a home supply must 
be created, and so slave-breeding as a business arose 
and flourished in the slave and border States. Con- 
scientious scruples disappeared before the hope of 
commercial and industrial gain ; and an interest in the 
permanence of the slave trade was created, not easily 
weakened by the growing moral sentiment of the 
North. The invention of the Cotton Gin may well be 
noted as of grave importance to the history of Amer- 
ica, inasmuch as it fastened upon the South an insti- 
tution unjust, unrighteous, and oppressive, destined 
to bring misery upon a race, and war upon a nation. 



BONDAGE ENFORCED 21 

In the In the colonial legislature of Massachusetts 
North, in 1641, a legal code, known as the "Body of 
Liberties," was enacted, in which it was de- 
clared that there should never be any bond slavery 
except of captives taken in "just war," or persons will- 
ingly sold ; and that all such should be treated as were 
the slaves of ancient Israel. Yet it was neither a 
Dutch nor an English ship, but that of Thomas Keyser 
and James Smith, the latter a member of the Boston 
church, which first drew upon this colony the infamy 
of sharing in the slave trade. In 1645, this ship sailed 
away to the Guinea coast "to trade for Negroes," and 
the year following two slaves were brought to the 
Massachusetts colony, procured in a Sunday slave- 
hunt in Africa. To the credit of the community, how- 
ever, it is recorded that a memorial was presented to 
the General Court, lamenting the triple crime of "mur- 
der, man-stealing, and Sabbath-breaking;" the gen- 
eral indignation resulted in the restoration of the 
Negroes to their native country at the public charge, 
and later in the year, a law was passed condemning to 
death whoever "stealeth a man or mankind." In the 
Connecticut and New Haven colonies, similar laws 
were soon after passed, but it remained for Rhode 
Island, home of Roger Williams, to pass in 1652 an 
act providing that ''no black mankind or white, forced 
by covenant-bond or otherwise," should serve more 
than ten years, or after the age of twenty-five, but 
should be set free. This law is said to be — 

"The first legislative enactment in the history of 
this continent, if not of the world, for the sup- 
pression of involuntary servitude." 

In New York, the Dutch settlers were provided with 
slave labor by the Dutch West Indian Company. In 
New Jersey, a bounty of seventy-five acres was oflfered 



22 LESSON I 

for every slave brought there, and Good Queen Anne 
urged the Royal African Company to have a constant 
supply of Negroes for this colony. Into Maryland, 
Delaware and Pennsylvania, slavery found its ready 
way, and while there was some public sentiment both 
in England and America against the traffic, and some 
attempt by legislation to restrict it, the number of 
slaves slowly increased even at the North. There, no 
plantations cried out for a multitude of workers, but 
on the small farms and in the households of the rich, 
slave labor was held valuable, but was never performed 
under conditions so humiliating and degrading as in 
the South. In New England, the profit of slaves at 
home was never so great as that of the slave ships at 
sea, and her commercial interests were fatally en- 
tangled with the trade. The poorest fish in a sea- 
son's catch were sent to feed the slaves of the West 
Indies ; molasses was the returning cargo, and, when 
changed to rum, this went to Africa, and was ex- 
changed for Negroes who were sold as slaves in the 
Southern colonies. Even the New England conscience 
was not proof against greed and gain, and any attempt 
to shift the responsibility of the institution and growth 
of slavery from North to South, will find no warrant in 
our early history. It remained for later years to see 
the public conscience aroused to realize the essential 
wrong of such a system. 

Treatment In the early days of slavery, the re- 

of the Slaves, ligious motive was not lacking in many 

a slave-holder North and South, for 
both Puritan and Huguenot shared the belief that they 
were instruments in the hand of God for the conver- 
sion of the world, and that the slave-system was His 
method of bringing both Indian and African into the 



BONDAGE ENFORCED 23 

number of the elect. So strong was this feehng, that 
with some there was even a behef that baptism might 
release a Negro from the bonds of servitude, a belief 
destroyed only in 1669, when an Act of the Crown 
declared that such baptism did not interfere with the 
master's rights in his human property. Often master 
and slave attended the same church services, sang the 
same songs, offered the same prayers, and shared the 
same church duties and privileges. Prof. W. E. B. 
DuBois, one of the most highly cultivated Negroes in 
the country, says: 

"Slavery brought the African three advantages; 
it taught him to labor, gave him the English 
language, and — after a sort — the Christian re- 
ligion." 

In the North, domestic servants were treated fairly 
and kindly, and, as in state after state, their gradual 
emancipation took place, the question of cruelty and 
oppression, of the demoralization of both master and 
bondman, calls for little notice there. Even in the 
South, in the later days when commercial profit had 
superseded the missionary motive, the picture was not 
wholly black, for there were good masters as well as 
bad. There was many a well-ordered plantation where 
the slaves were treated with kindness and justice, 
where all necessary physical comforts were provided, 
and where the relations between masters, mistresses, 
and servants were fair and friendly. Had all slave- 
owners been like Calhoun of South Carolina, one 
of the foremost champions of the system, or like 
Thomas Dabney of Virginia and Mississippi, the story 
of slavery would lack those dark and dreadful chap- 
ters which cast so dense a gloom over the whole. But 
conscienceless planters, cruel overseers, and hard task- 
masters were all too numerous, and the bitterness of 



24 LES80N I 

bondage was tasted to the full by their hapless human 
victims. Worse than the deprivations of proper food 
and shelter, worse than hard work and most cruel 
Hoggings, were the constant fear and uncertainty of 
life, the family separations, the utter lack of the re- 
wards and incentives of labor, of the privileges of 
learning and the rights of law, the stigma of race and 
servitude, and the burning sense of injustice in being 
merely a thing, a chattel. 

Some Southern Whatever may be said in extenuation 
Laws. of the system as humane, or neces- 

sary, or advantageous, from the view 
point of the exceptionally just and generous masters, 
the barbarous legislation of the Southern States in the 
interests of preserving such an institution, is one of 
the severest indictments against slave owners and 
law-makers. Two or three quotations from their 
statutes will suffice as proof or illustration. 

"Any person who shall attempt to teach any free 
person of color or slave to spell, read, or write, 
shall, upon conviction thereof, be imprisoned not 
less than one, or more than twelve months." 

That is Louisiana. 

"Teaching slaves to read and write tends to 
excite dissatisfaction in their minds and to pro- 
duce insurrection and rebellion; therefore, if any 
person shall give or sell to any slave a Bible, 
tract, or book of any kind, such person, if white, 
shall be punished with a fine of two hundred dol- 
lars; and, if a free negro, with thirty-nine lashes 
on the bare back." 

That is North Carolina. In South Carolina, the slave 
discovered receiving such instruction was beaten with 
many stripes, and his instructor fined to the amount of 
five hundred dollars. Morality as well as mental de- 
velopment was outraged by the law, as witness the 



BONDAGE ENFORCED 25 

code of Louisiana, "Slaves shall not contract matri- 
mony;" and the sanctity of human Hfe was subject to 
such an enactment as this : 

"If any slave shall presume to strike any white 
person, such slave may be lawfully killed." 

Mutilation and murder on the part of the master was 
scarcely counted sin or crime, and the sense of human 
right grew pitifully less. Neither Hebrew legislation 
nor Christian teaching had as yet leavened the mingled 
lump of black and white humanity in the New World. 

FEDERAL LEGISLATION 

The Ordinance When the War of Independence 
of 1787. closed, England had learned that her 

fostering care of the slave trade had 
not availed to prevent the independence her statesmen 
had sometimes anticipated. A quotation from a 
pamphlet published in 1745 shows how political, as 
well as commercial reasons entered into the English 
policy : 

"Negro labor will keep our British colonies in a 
close subserviency to the interest of their mother 
country; for, while our plantations depend only 
on planting by Negroes, our colonies can never 
prove injurious to British manufactures, never 
become independent of their Kingdom." 

But victory for the colonists gave them the right to 
legislate for themselves, and placed upon them the 
great responsibility of carving out the future of three 
races, the white, the red, and the black. The slave 
trade was now a national, and not a local question. As 
early as 1784, when the Continental Congress attempt- 
ed to fix the conditions of the great and fertile terri- 
tory between the 31st and 47th parallels, a committee, 
of which Thomas Jefferson was a member, was ap- 



26 LESSON I 

pointed to report a plan for its government, and their 
plan provided for its division into seventeen states, 
with this Hmitation : 

"After the year of the Christian Era 1800, there 
shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude 
in any of these states, otherwise than in the pun- 
ishment of crime, whereof the party shall have 
been duly convicted." 

Had this provision not failed of acceptance, slavery 
v^ould have been prohibited not alone in the Northwest 
Territory, but also in Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, 
and Mississippi. A year later, a delegate from Massa- 
chusetts moved to modify this report by inserting a. 
clause demanding total and immediate prohibition of 
slavery, but his motion, too, failed. In 1787, a com- 
mittee with a Massachusetts chairman reported an 
ordinance for the territory northwest of the Ohio, in 
which there should be neither slavery nor involuntary 
servitude. In spite of the provision for the returning 
of fugitive slaves, this was a victory for freedom, and 
showed that then, even in the South, there was much 
anti-slavery sentiment. But the cotton gin was not 
yet invented ! In the years following, many and per- 
sistent efforts were made to repeal or at least suspend 
the ordinance in the interest of settlers from the slave- 
holding states, but fortunately for the North and for 
the nation, they proved unavailing, and the Ordinance 
of 1787 stands as one of the great events in American 
history, a political and moral achievement of immense 
importance. 

Constitutional This decision rendered slavery more 
Compromises, than ever a Southern question. In the 

North, gradual emancipation had by 
this time been effected, and even Nature seemed to 



BONDAGE ENFORCED 27 

have placed upon the South the responsibiUty of the 
Negro race. The Negro is a child of the sun ; even 
Virginia's climate proved too cold for him, and the 
farther south he went, the more valuable was his labor. 
Little wonder is it, then, that in the Constitutional 
Convention which sat for months behind closed doors 
in Philadelphia, strife and contention should arise, and 
compromise be the natural result. Nor is it strange 
that in the hot and bitter struggle, South Carolina and 
Georgia should be the foremost champions of an 
abominable traffic. The Declaration of Independence 
had proclaimed ''in deathless words" the theory of hu- 
man equality, but the framers of the Constitution 
made the phrase a mockery. The debate centered 
about three stirring questions : representation in Con- 
gress, the continuance of the slave-trade, and the treat- 
ment of fugitive slaves. The first was finally settled 
by counting five slaves as equal to three freemen, a 
decision that gave no political rights or privileges to 
each three-fifths of a man, but only additional power 
to their masters to legislate in their own interest 
against their black possessions. The second fierce de- 
bate resulted in a provision allowing an extension of 
the trade in African Negroes for twenty years, until 
the year 1808, unrestrained by national legislation. 
The third demand of the South — that fugitive slaves 
and servants be delivered up like criminals — was con- 
ceded, tho, out of respect to Northern scruples, the 
word slave was not mentioned in this article, nor in 
the entire constitution : "persons held to service or 
labor," was the phrase. Thus were wrung from the 
Constitutional Convention those fatal concessions, 
"which then and thereafter trammelled the hand of 
Liberty and armed the hand of slavery." But much 



28 LESSON I 

was at stake. The leader of the extreme South de- 
clared : 

"Religion and humanity have nothing to do with 
this question. Interest alone is the governing 
principle with nations. The true question is, 
whether the Southern States shall or shall not be 
parties to the Union." 

Humiliating as was the wavering of Northern princi- 
ple, it must not be forgotten that it was concession or 
defeat, compromise or anarchy; and later generations 
of Northern statesmen have made their compromises, 
too. 



The Slave As the year 1808 drew near, measures 
Ships. were taken to affix suitable penalties for 

failure to obey the law forbidding the 
slave-trade after that date^ and again there was fiery 
debate and weakening compromise. In spite of 
the laws of Congress and the Great Jehovah, the 
infamous traffic, both foreign and domestic, contin- 
ued and increased, sometimes carried on in secret, 
sometimes boldly and triumphantly. In the early 
days the horrors of the passage from the coasts 
of Western Africa were heart-rending. Five hundred 
Negroes were crowded into so small a bark that the 
wonder is that any could have lived ; the hands of the 
strong men were made fast by manacles, and the right 
leg of one was often chained to the left leg of another 
— sometimes even a half or two-thirds perished on the 
voyage, from fever, thirst, and disease contracted, 
perhaps, in the long, hard journey from the interior of 
the continent to the coast. The story of the later traf- 
fic gives little evidence of a quickened conscience or a 
growing Christian sentiment in those who wilfully de- 
fied the law. Long after England had suppressed the 



BONDAGE ENFORCED 29 

trade in Negroes, and had emancipated the slaves in 
all her colonies, and other European nations had be- 
gun to breathe the air of liberty, ships sailing under 
the Stars and Stripes were bringing their miserable, 
helpless, human cargoes to our land, ''the land of the 
free." It is stated that in the years between 1840 and 
1848, the British government caught and destroyed 
625 slave-ships and freed 40,000 of their victims, 
while the American government was doing nothing 
to enforce its laws. Only too truly in those dark days 
could the Quaker poet sing : 

"0, say, shall Prussia's banner be 

A refuge for the stricken slave? 
And shall the Russian serf go free. 

By Baikal's lake and Neva's wave? 
And shall the wintry-bosomed Dane 

Relax the iron hand of pride, 
And bid his bondmen cast the chain 

From fettered soul and limb aside? 

Shall every flap of England's flag 

Proclaim that all around are free, 
From "farthest Ind" to each blue crag 

That beetles o'er the Western Sea? 
And shall we scoff at Europe's kings 

When Freedom's fire is dim with us. 
And round our country's altar clings 

The damning shade of slavery's curse?" 

Tales of horror that shocked the civilized world at 
length forced the American government to revive 
some of its forgotten laws, and Congress declared 
that hanging should be the penalty of those captured 
in the act of continuing the unlawful traffic. But 
greed of gain was stronger than law or conscience, 
and from New York City alone were secretly sent in 
eighteen months eighty-five ships to gather an ill- 
gotten cargo of hapless humanity. Excuse? $17,- 
000,000 a year! 



30 LESSON I 

Tlie f'lotiMe In spite of ConstiLiitional prohibition, it 
iu 1859. was the year 1859 before the last slave 

ship brought its miserable victims into 
Mobile Bay and up the Alabama River, a year in 
which, it has been stated, no fewer than 15,000 chained 
and tortured human beings were brought into the 
United States. That the last days of the traffic were 
as infamous as the first, is evident from the following 
description quoted from an article in Harper's Month- 
ly for October, 1906: 

"Many things can be forgotten in forty-seven 
years, and probably few Americans remember the 
story of the slave ship Clotilde, that was run into 
Mobile Bay and burned one dark night in 1859, 
and how its cargo of slaves was dumped off into 
the canebrakes and left, some to be picked up and 
sold, some to wander about and starve, and some 
to die of homesickness. ****** j^ slow, 
soft tones of awful earnestness she (Abacky) 
spoke of their peaceful farm and village life in 
Africa; how they tilled the ground, planting yams 
and rice; how some of the women traded in pro- 
duce with other tribes, and all was peaceful; and 
then one summer morning, just at the daybreak, 
they heard sudden shouts and firing of guns. 
Men, women and children sprang from their beds, 
only to be killed or captured. It was the 
'raiders' of the terrible King Dahomey, come to 
enslave the villagers! The surprise was so com- 
plete that in half an hour all was over. The 
young and strong were chained together by the 
necks, the feeble and the old left dead or dying 
in their burning village. ***** 

Abacky's story of the march to the coast, 
the murderous cruelty of that voyage of weeks 
and months, as the helpless captives crouched in 
filth and darkness, chained in the hot hold of the 
ship, gasping for breath, praying for a drop of 
water, was related in a way that would have 
melted a heart of stone. After forty years, her 
eyes were burning, her soul inexpressibly agitated 
at the memory." 



BONDAGE ENFORCED 31 

Of the Clotilde, as of many another slave ship, might 
it have been written : 

"Hark! from the ship's dark bosom, 

The very sounds of hell; 
The ringing clank of iron, — 

The maniac's short, sharp yell! — 
The hoarse, low curse, throat stifled — 

The starving infant's moan, — 
The horror of a breaking heart. 

Poured through a mother's groan!" 



Furtiier Legal Even to the casual student of United 
Euactmeuts. States history, the principal legal 

measures of the years between 1787 
and i860 are as familiar as a twice told tale, and only 
brief reference to them need be made, but with the 
humiliating acknowledgment that almost without ex- 
ception every Congressional act of that long period 
was a victory for the growing slave-power of the 
South. The treaty with the Creek Indians in 1790, by 
which they agreed to return any fugitive slaves 
among them; the Fugitive Slave Law of 1793, which 
permitted the owner to recover his property in any 
State to which he might have fled ; the act of 1798 
which gave the right of extending slavery in the terri- 
tory ceded by Georgia and North Carolina, were early 
steps in the development of that power; and then for 
twenty years there was comparatively little contro- 
versy over it, as the number of new states entering the 
Union had not destroyed the balance of political 
power, and of the twenty states comprising the Union 
in 1819, just half were free, and half were slave 
States. When Missouri knocked for admission, there 
was long and bitter conflict, and the famous Missouri 
Compromise of 1820, permitting Missouri to enter as 
a Slave State, but forbidding slavery in all that part of 



32 LESSON I 

the Louisiana Purchase north of 36° 30' was really a 
concession to the South. The suppression of the 
Right of Petition for the nine years from 1836 until 
1845 ; the failure of the Wilmot Proviso in 1846, to 
exclude slavery from all territory acquired from Mex- 
ico, — a country which, in 1829, had entered upon a 
course of gradual emancipation ; the Compromise of 
1850, which exacted such an exorbitant price for the 
entrance of California as a Free State ; the Kansas- 
Nebraska Bill in 1854, repealing the Missouri Com- 
promise ; the Dred Scott decision in 1857 — all these 
were legislative victories for the slave-holding states. 
But the election of Abraham Lincoln in i860 was a 
victory for freedom, and the day of Emancipation was 
drawing near! 





Garrison, ihk Amoi.itiomst 



Lesson II 
Freedom Achieved 



AIVTI-SLAVEKY MOVEMENTS 

Early Protests Foremost among the number of those 
In the Nortli. who saw the wickedness of slavery 

was John EHot, the Apostle to the 
Indians, who, in 1675, presented to the Governor and 
Council of Massachusetts a memorial against selling 
captured Indians into slavery, on the ground not only 
that it hindered the enlargement of Christ's Kingdom, 
but that "the selling of souls is a dangerous merchan- 
dise." Neither did he forget the poor Africans, but 
lamented "with a bleeding and burning passion" their 
sad ignorance and oppression. In 1700, Judge Samuel 
Sewall of Massachusetts wrote a convincing pamphlet 
called The Selling of Joseph, a Memorial, in which he 
declared that, "originally and naturally," there was no 
such thing as slavery ; and that — 

"These Ethiopians, as black as they are, seeing 
they are the sons and daughters of the first Adam, 
the brethren and sisters of the last Adam and 
the offspring of God, ought to be treated with 
respect agreeable." 

Among the Society of Friends, there was intense op- 
position to "buying, selling, and holding men in slav- 
ery," — and some of their most active and ardent 
preachers of righteousness were George Keith of 



34 LESSON II 

Pennsylvania, Mary Starbuck of Nantucket, John 
Woolman of New Jersey, and Anthony Bezet, the son 
of Huguenot parents, who not only proclamied the 
iniquity of the slave-trade, but established and taught 
an evening school for the instruction of Negroes. This 
is one of the earliest instances on record of Home 
Mission work for this race, and it served to give a new 
view of their great advance in morals and religion to 
certain influential persons, too much inclined to regard 
with contempt this Christian effort. John Wesley and 
George Whitefield in their visits to the colonies were 
moved to denounce the system most emphatically, the 
former calling it "the sum of all villainies," and "the 
vilest that ever saw the sun ;" the latter, deeply dis- 
tressed by the "miseries of the poor Negro," described 
with tragic pathos their brutal treatment, and cruel 
scourgings by coarse and conscienceless masters. In 
1770, Dr. Samuel Hopkins of Newport was stirred to 
righteous indignation by what he saw in his own 
town ; for, in spite of the enactment of Rhode Island 
in 1652 against the purchase of Negroes, Newport had 
become the great slave-market of New England, and 
cargoes of miserable slaves were often landed near the 
very home and church of that noted minister. Not 
satisfied with boldly rebuking the members of his own 
congregation, and visiting from house to house in the 
interest of release for the slaves, he wrote in 1776 a 
dialogue on slavery, and published with it his famous 
sermon dedicating it to the Continental Congress. This 
has been called "the ablest document which had at that 
time, and on that theme appeared in the English 
language," and it had great influence on public opin- 
ion. Another Declaration of Independence to make 
memorable the year 1776! 



FREEDOM ACHIEVED 35 

8ome Sofithero Had there been no turn in the tide of 
Sentimeuts. pubiic sentiment in the South after 

the early days of the Repubhc, the 
darkest chapter in our history need never have been 
written, for the noblest statesmen looked forward to 
gradual emancipation as right and necessary. Wash- 
ington declared that the abolition of slavery must take 
place, and that, too, at a period not remote, — and set 
free his own slaves. Thomas Jefferson uttered that 
oft-quoted sentiment : 

"I tremble for my country when I reflect that 
God is just, and that his justice cannot sleep for- 
ever." 

Patrick Henry said : 

"Slavery is detested; we feel its fatal effects; we 
deplore it with all the pity of humanity; I believe 
the time will come when an opportunity will be 
offered to abolish this lamentable evil." 

Madison and Monroe condemned the system ; Henry 
Laurens of South Carolina, desiring to free his slaves 
in 1776, wrote his son of his abhorrence of slavery', 
and said : 

"The day, I hope, is approaching when, from 
principles of gratitude, as well as justice, every 
man will strive to be foremost in showing his 
readiness to comply with the Golden Rule." 

One of the most conspicuous examples of such com- 
pliance was that of another Southern hero, Gov. 
Edward Coles, whose Christian patriotism is too little 
known. Inheriting in Virginia hundreds of slaves 
whom he could not liberate according to the laws of 
his own state, he emigrated in 18 19 to Illinois, and 
on the flat boat which took him and his possessions 
down the Ohio, he gathered his blacks about him by 



36 LESSON II 

night, and gave them their freedom, and in the new 
home supplied them with land, cabins, stock and tools, 
and aided them to become self-supporting. This is 
the testimony he gave in each deed of emancipation : 

"Whereas I do not believe a man can have a right 
of property in his fellow-men, — I do therefore 

restore to the said that inalienable liberty 

of which they have been deprived." 

Such expressions of opinion and such conduct suffi- 
ciently illustrate what has been called the first stage in 
the sentiment of representative men in the South ; — 
"Slavery is an evil, and we will soon get rid of it." 

Colonization Closely connected with the question of 
Schemes. suppressing the slave-trade, and abolish- 

ing slavery, was that of disposing of the 
free Negroes and those smuggled into the States in 
defiance of the law, or delivered from such vessels as 
were seized by the commanders of U. S. war vessels. 
Even before the Revolution, Dr. Samuel Hopkins had 
outlined a plan of African colonization which he be- 
lieved was in the interest of Christianity and civiliza- 
tion ; and in an address delivered before the Provi- 
dence Anti-Slavery Society in 1793, he stated the pur- 
pose of this suggested movement to be "to maintain 
the practise of Christianity in the sight of their 
now heathen brethren, endeavor to instruct and civil- 
ize them, and spread the knowledge of the gospel 
among them." Many others at the North shared his 
truly Christian and philanthropic spirit in advocating 
such a measure, and but for their honest purpose and 
the hope of greater gains in emancipation, this para- 
graph would have no place under the topic Anti- 
Slavery Movements. For in the South, the advocates 
of such a scheme were nearly all inspired by a desire 



FREEDOM ACHIEVED 37 

to "rid our country of a useless and pernicious, if not 
a dangerous portion of its population," and indirectly 
to render slavery and the slave-holder more secure. To 
Samuel J. Mills, one of the heroes of the famous Hay- 
stack Prayer-meeting — the centennial of v^hich was 
observed with such enthusiasm at Williamstown in 
October, 1906, — may be attributed the influence which 
resulted in the organization in 18 16 of the American 
Colonisation Society. Full of a missionary zeal which 
inspired his bold, prophetic outburst, ''We can do it, 
if zve mill," and led to the formation of both the Amer- 
ican Bible Society and the American Board of Com- 
missioners for Foreign Missions, he found the condi- 
tion of the Negro a subject of absorbing interest. His 
first desire was to better that condition by founding a 
colony somewhere between the Ohio and the Great 
Lakes ; when that proved unwise, in Africa. Going to 
New Jersey to complete his theological studies he suc- 
ceeded in interesting the Presbyterian ministers of 
that state ; and it was one of these, Dr. Robert Finley, 
who called at Princeton the iirst meeting to consider 
the plan of sending Negro colonists to Africa. Later, 
he went to Washington in the interest of the project, 
and, finding in the South a movement similar, even if 
inspired by different motives, he was successful in con- 
vening the assembly which formed that society which 
sent S. J. Mills and Ebenezer Burgess to Africa to 
secure a suitable site for the colonv to be. Mills died 
before reaching home, but the enterprise was fairly 
started, and the Free Republic of Liberia is the result. 
Of less value and permanence, but of a certain curi- 
ous interest, because of its private and feminine origin, 
was the scheme of Frances Wright, a young woman 
from Dundee, Scotland. A two-years' visit in New 
England intensified her interest in republicanism, and 



38 LESSON II 

the rights of man. Three years spent later in the 
family of Lafayette in France in no way lessened that 
interest, and she returned in 1824 to the States, this 
time landing at a Southern port. There she became 
aware of the horrors of slavery, and set about devising 
some way of proving the possibility of gradual abo- 
lition. Having proposed that sections of the public 
land should be purchased in the Cotton States, that 
colonies of one or two hundred slaves should be set- 
tled on each section, with a system of co-operative 
labor and industrial education to fit the slaves and 
their children for freedom, she proceeded to set an 
example of such a community. She purchased in 
1825 a tract of twenty-four hundred acres, thirteen 
miles from Memphis, and planted a town she called 
Nashoba. Money for the experiment was freely 
given, but Nashoba was a failure, and in 1829 Miss 
Wright took her Negroes off to Hayti, where Benjamin 
Lundy was urging his countrymen to send their lib- 
erated slaves. How widespread was the movement of 
colonization, in spite of its inconsistencies of motive 
and policy, is evident from the fact that in 1828, there 
were no fewer than ninety-eight auxiliaries to the 
American Society, and more than half of them in the 
Border Slave States. If these schemes were of little 
avail for removing the free Negroes of that early 
time, how absurdly impossible is the modern sugges- 
tion, sometimes rashly hazarded, of transporting 
10,000,000 blacks to the heart of Africa ! 

The Great as was the interest in this move- 

Abolitionists, ment, it was not the Colonization So- 
ciety which was to eflfect emancipation, 
gradual or instant. The way for that was prepared 
by a little band of men, — and women, whose hearts 



FREEDOM ACHIEVED 39 

and souls and consciences had been stirred to the 
depths by the injustice and cruelties of a Slave Pozver 
growing ever stronger and more daring. Even before 
the Revolution, there had been organized in Pennsyl- 
vania the first Abolition Society ever formed, — "The 
Society for the relief of free Negroes unlawfully held 
in bondage ;" shortly after, New York, Rhode Island, 
Connecticut, New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia had 
similar organizations. In 1804 was held the Am.eri- 
can Convention of Abolition Societies, a meeting 
which deplored the decline of interest in the cause, and 
especially the absence of delegates from the Southern 
Societies. So we find the term abolition of frequent 
occurrence in the earlier anti-slavery movements, but 
as the definite characterization of a new purpose and 
metliod, it seems to have appeared about the time of 
Garrison and The Liberator. A recent writer has 
defined an Abolitionist as ''a person to whom the su- 
preme interest in public affairs was the extinction of 
slavery," and Benjamin Lundy may well be called the 
"Father of the Abolitionists." A Quaker, born in 
New Jersey, he learned the saddler's trade in West 
Virginia, where his righteous soul was vexed within 
him, as he saw great companies of suffering slaves 
pass thru on their way to the more Southern markets. 
Inspired with the Christian spirit of sacrifice and labor 
for others, he consecrated his life to a great cause, 
literally leaving all to obey the call of his Divine 
Master ; he left his business, his home, his loving wife 
and children, and went about rousing consciences 
everywhere to the sin and curse of slavery. In 182 1, 
he began the publication of the first Abolition paper, 
The Genius of Universal Emancipation, and it was on 
one of Lundy's tours to the Free States in the inter- 
ests of this paper that he met in Boston William Lloyd 



40 LE880N II 

Garrison, then a young journalist editing the first tem- 
perance paper in the United States, The National 
Philanthropist. Garrison was even then a zealous 
enemy of slavery, but until he heard Lundy's criti- 
cism of colonization methods and his statement that 
the increase in the slave population for one year was 
greater than any diminution that society could effect 
in fifty, he had given his approval and his assistance 
to that organization. Later, he joined Lundy in Bal- 
timore to help in the publication of The Genius, and 
while there, he saw the captain of a ship from New 
England take on board a cargo of slaves for New 
Orleans. This course he vigorously denounced, and 
was sentenced to fine and imprisonment ; his fine was 
paid by a generous philanthropist, and after a seven 
weeks' imprisonment, he started on a career of lec- 
turing in New England, and in 1831 issued in Boston 
The Liberator, chief organ of the extreme abolition- 
ists, advocating immediate and unconditional emanci- 
pation. 

Its frontispiece was as pronounced as its doc- 
trine; it represented an auction at which "slaves, 
horses, and other cattle" were offered for sale, 
and a whipping post where a slave was being 
flogged; while in the back-ground was the capitol 
at Washington, with a flag inscribed LIBERTY, 
floating over the dome. 

Many shared the views of Garrison and, in 1832, the 
A''. E. Anti-Slavery Society was founded, and a year 
later at Philadelphia, the American Anti-Slavery 
Society. The year (1831) which saw The Liberator 
launched on its uncompromising career was marked 
by a violent uprising of the slaves in Virginia under 
]\at Turner, an uprising quickly subdued, but creat- 
ing the wildest excitement thruout the South, out of 
all proportion to the actual harm done. This combi- 



FREEDOM ACHIEVED 41 

nation of events, and the counter-agitation caused by 
the new movement at the North brought the Southern- 
ers to the view, — ''Slavery is good and right, and we 
will maintain it," — and the irrepressible conflict was 
to grow more and more bitter until the end. 
Most eloquent and enthusiastic of Garrison's allies 
was Wendell Phillips, who threw himself heart and 
soul into the righteous cause ; but the ranks of the 
Abolitionists included, besides, such men as James G. 
Birney and John G. Whittier, William EUery Chan- 
ning and Frederick Douglass, Theodore Parker and 
Samuel J. May, Parker Pilsbury and Gerritt Smith ; 
and such women as Lucretia Mott — the gentle Quaker- 
ess — Lydia Maria Child and Lucy Stone. This devoted 
b?nd of earnest workers were but few against the 
many opposing or indifferent forces, and scorn, abuse, 
physical danger, and sometimes death itself were 
thrust upon them ; but their service to the cause is the 
better appreciated in view of the fact that, until the 
formation of the Republican party in 1854, nearly all 
the political leaders, ministers, college professors, and 
influential men had held aloof, or openly condemned 
the Abolition movement. After Benjamin Lundy had 
made, in the chapel of a Baptist church in Boston, 
that address which won Garrison to the cause, the 
pastor denounced the agitation of the slave question 
in New England, declared that the North had no busi- 
ness to meddle with the Constitution, and dismissed 
the meeting. What changes hath God wrought ! 

Literary The list of anti-slavery journals was a 
Influences, long one, nor were those publications 
found only in the North, as the appear- 
ance of The Emancipator in Tennessee in 1819, The 
Abolition Intelligencer in Kentucky in 1822, and The 



42 LESSON II 

Liberalist in New Orleans in 1828 abundantly proves. 
Besides these, over fifty daily and weekly newspapers 
opened their columns to the literature of emancipa- 
tion, and there was a constantly increasing- output of 
pamphlets, appeals, reports, orations, tracts, and treat- 
ises, bearing on the absorbing question. The works 
of Clarkson, Wilberforce, and other English agitators 
were widely read, and American writers rose to the 
occasion with volumes of indisputable facts and con- 
vincing arguments, or of burning appeal and poetic 
fire, kindling indignation and rousing sleeping con- 
sciences. Nearly all the makers of the new American 
literature were friends of the anti-slavery cause, and 
the New England literary group, its ardent cham- 
pions. Emerson in his quiet inspiration, Bryant in 
active journalism, Whittier and Lowell in stirring 
stanzas of freedom, represented the best Christian 
sentiment of a nation awakening to its sense of broth- 
erhood, right and justice, — a nation to awaken in a 
later generation to its sense of missionary obligation 
to these same black brothers. There is no uncertain 
sound in these ringing words of Whittier: 

"What, ho! our countrymen in chains! 

The whip on WOMAN'S shrinking flesh! 
Our soil yet reddening with the stains 

Caught from her scourging, warm and fresh! 
What! mothers from their children riven! 

What! God's own image bought and sold! 
AMERICANS to market driven, 

And bartered as the brute for gold!" 

In the Biglow Papers, Lowell brought to the move- 
ment the saving grace of humor, but even in the New 
England vernacular he was expressing the stern 
New England conscience. In Jonathan to John he 
Avrote : 



FREEDOM ACHIEVED 43 

"God means to make this land, John, 

Clear thru, from sea to sea, 
Believe an' understand, John, 

The wuth o' bein' free. 
Ole Uncle S. sez he, 'I guess, 

God's price is high,' sez he; 
But nothin' else than wut He sells 

Wears long, an' thet J. B. 
May larn, like you an' me!" 

And in more solemn strain he sang: 

"We see dimly in the present what is small and 

what is great. 
Slow of faith, how weak an arm may turn the 

iron helm of fate. 
But the soul is still oracular; amid the market's 

din. 
List the ominous stern whisper from the Delphic 

cave within — 
'They enslave their children's children, who make 

compromise with sin.' " 

It was, in very truth, the ivcak ann of a woman which 
wielded the pen that stirred to the depths the heart of 
the American people, winning sympathy for the 
oppressed, and setting forth the need and the possi- 
bility of redressing such unspeakable wrongs. Uncle 
Tom's Cabin appeared in 1852, *'an irresistible plea, 
not against a section, but a system;" and the story is 
told that when, years afterward, President Lincoln 
first met Mrs. Stowe, he took her hand in both of his 
and said, "Is this the little woman, who made this big 
war?" All honor to the noble Christian women who 
anticipated and made possible the Home Mission 
efforts of to-day ! 

The UHderground The story of Eliza in Uncle Tom's 
Railroad. Cabin, fleeing in desperation from 

her miserable captivity, and endur- 
ing the horrors of violent pursuit, is an apt illustration 



44 LE880N II 

of the natural impulse to escape from a bondage 
often worse than death itself. Occasional flights 
across Mason and Dixon's line early occurred, but 
after the War of 1812, when soldiers, returning from 
Canada, brought back the news of "a. land of freedom 
towards the North Star," their number was greatly 
increased. The slaves, with the marvelous faith of 
their race, and equal ignorance of distance and 
danger, made plans of escape which must have miser- 
ably failed, had not the natural impulse of Christian 
hearts prompted benevolent men and women at the 
North to aid them in every possible way. Secretly yet 
courageously, often at the risk of life and property, 
these forerunners of the modern missionary move- 
ment for a needy people organized and carried on 
most effectively a system of helping the fleeing slave 
to evade the pursuit of the slave-hunter so fiercely on 
his track. This institution was known as The Under- 
ground Railroad, and connected with its workings 
were many men of wealth and influence. Levi Coffin 
of Cincinnati was familiarly called its President, but 
Thomas Garrett of Delaware was undoubtedly its 
most efficient agent, having by actual record assisted 
over 2700 slaves to escape, besides those not counted 
in his earliest operations. The following is Henry 
Wilson's description of the method and management 
of this great philanthropic movement. 

"The practical working of the system required 
stations at convenient distances, or rather the 
houses of persons who held themselves in readi- 
ness to receive fugitives, singly, or in numbers, 
at any hour of day or night, to feed and shelter, to 
clothe, if necessary, ^and to conceal until they 
could be dispatched with safety to some other 
point along the route. There were others who 
held themselves in like readiness to take them by 
private or public conveyance. If by the former 



FREEDOM ACHIEVED - 45 

mode, they generally went in the night by such 
routes and with such disguises as gave the best 
warrant against detection, either by the slave- 
catchers, or their many sympathizers scattered 
far too thickly even among the Free States. When 
the wide extent of territory embraced by the Mid- 
dle States and all the Western States east of the 
Mississippi is borne in mind, and it is remembered 
that the whole was dotted with these stations and 
covered with a net work of imaginary routes, 
not found, indeed, in the railway guides or on the 
railv/ay maps; that each station had its brave and 
faithful men and women, ever on the alert to seek 
out and succor the coming fugitive, and equally 
intent on deceiving and thwarting his pursuer; 
that the numbers actually were very great, many 
counting their trophies by hundreds, and some by 
thousands, — there are materials from which to 
estimate, approximately, at least, the amount 
of labor performed, of cost and risk incurred on 
the despised and deprecated Undergronnd Railroad, 
and something of the magnitude of the results 
secured. For romantic interest, heroic bravery 
and persistent courage, incidents might here be 
found equal to any in the annals of the Revolu- 
tion or the Rebellion." 

THE GREAT REBELLION 

John Brown's Among the many active promoters of 
Raid. the Underground Railroad was John 

Brown, a man of New England birth, 
a Hneal descendant of the Pilgrims and an inheritor of 
the stern but righteous Puritanic spirit. Early re- 
moved to the Western Reserve, he grew up amid the 
straitened circumstances of pioneer life, always deep- 
ly conscientious and religious, desiring no higher ob- 
ject in life than to relieve the suffering and release 
the oppressed. In 1847, then living in Springfield, 
Mass., he disclosed to Frederick Douglass a plan he 
had made, but never executed, of freeing the slaves 
by establishing a fugitive refuge among the natural 



46 LE880N II 

hiding-places of the mountains reaching from New 
York State to the Gulf. With twenty-five picked and 
well-armed men, posted at suitable intervals, over a 
distance of twenty-five miles, sallies, he thought, could 
be made out into the fields to persuade the most reck- 
less and daring of the slaves to join them; and so, by 
destroying the value and security of slave property, a 
general movement for freedom might begin. Little 
did he realize the strength and tenacity of the Slave 
Power i When the great fight was on in Bleeding 
Kansas, he went thither, first to carry arms and am- 
nuuiition to his four sons settled there, and then to 
engage in the struggle to save that land for freemen 
and their liberties. When the struggle there was over, 
the mind of the gray and grizzled warrior continued 
to brood over the wrongs of the oppressed with a con- 
stantly growing conviction that he was called of God, 
like the Jewish heroes of old, to attack and to deliver. 
Returning to the plan of 1847, ^^^ sought aid from 
the New Englanders who had so forwarded the Free 
vState cause in Kansas, and among them were some so 
eager for something more immediate than the delays 
of the peace policy, that they were won by Brown's 
strong personality, and aided him, tho understanding 
his plan but imperfectly. Such men as Theodore 
Parker, Gerritt Smith, Dr. S. G. Howe, Thomas 
Wentworth Higginson, and F. B. Sanborn were of 
this number. After much preliminary conference, 
Brown, having abandoned his original idea, marched 
on Harper's Ferry, vainly imagining that the slaves 
were ready to rise against their masters and fight for 
liberty, if only there was a leader and a plan. The 
story of the raid is soon told ; the quick surprise on 
the night of October 16, 1859; the ready capture of the 
U. S. Army and a number of prominent prisoners by 



FREEDOM ACHIEVED 47 

a little force of nineteen men, fourteen white and five 
black men ; the holding of the town for thirty hours ; 
then the arrival of Col. Robert E. Lee and the defeat 
of the brave little company. A trial, a condemnation, 
and an execution ! ! ! And to "what purpose was this 
waste?" Varying as are the estimates of John Brown's 
conduct, there is little doubt that the man himself wal 
inspired by the highest motives and the firmest faith 
in God, and love for his suffering fellowmen. A sys- 
tem that required his execution must needs lie under 
heavy condemnation. So the effect at the North was 
to deepen the conviction that slavery was absolutely 
and essentially wrong ; and at the South, to strengthen 
the sentiment of hatred against the North and every 
anti-slavery man or method, a hatred soon to burst 
forth in war and bloodshed. John Brown's spirit was 
stronger than his arms, and when, a few months later, 
a Massachusetts regiment started for the scene of con- 
flict, it was to an extemporized song, caught up by 
regiment after regiment till it became the marching 
song of the Union armies, 

"John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave, 
His soul goes marching on!" 

The Republican The question of slavery had always 
Partj-. been one of more or less importance 

in politics, and in the Presidential 
campaign of 1840, the anti-slavery men for the first 
time made it a definite political issue and under the 
name of the Liberty Party presented their own candi- 
date for the Presidency. This was James G. Birney, 
a Southerner by birth, but a man of strong character 
and pronounced, but not extreme, anti-slavery views, 
who had written in 1835 : 

"The contest is becoming, has become— not one 



48 LESSON II 

alone of freedom for the blacks, but of freedom 
for the whites." 

That was the famous log-cabin and hard cider cam- 
paign with its cry of "Tippecanoe and Tyler, too;" so 
only a handful of votes was cast for Birney, but the 
standard raised by the Liberty Party was to march to 
victory only twenty years later. By 1848, this party, 
having gained new strength, took the new name Free 
Soil, and added to its ranks such illustrious sons of 
Massachusetts as Samuel Hoar, Charles Summer, 
Henry Wilson, and N. P. Banks. The Whig Party in 
Massachusetts included many anti-slavery men known 
as Conscience Whigs; in the ranks of the Democratic 
Party, especially in New York State, were men of 
similar view called Barnburners, because ''they would 
burn the barn to get rid of the rats ;" and these to- 
gether met in a Free Soil Convention in Buffalo and 
proclaimed their principles, ''Free Soil, Free Speech, 
Free Labor, and Free Men." Their candidate was 
not elected, but their principles were to re-appear in 
the new Republican Party, born in 1854, but holding 
its first convention in Philadelphia in Jime, 1856. It 
has been said that this convention was made up of the 
heart, the independence, and the brains of all parties, 
— "politics with a heart and conscience in it." The 
slavery issue was paramount in the declaration of 
principles, and one of their mottoes gave concise ex- 
pression to their doctrine: "Freedom National, 
Slavery Sectional.'' John C. Fremont was then 
nominated as candidate for the nation's highest office, 
and the rallying cry of that campaign was Fremont 
and Freedom. That cry did not bear the new 
party on to victory, but it won substantial gains, and 
held within Itself the promise of success. 

"If months have well nigh won the field 
What may not four years do?" 



FREEDOM ACHIEVED 49 

The Election Four years did win it ! In the Philadel- 
of Lincoln. phia Convention of 1856, no votes were 
cast for Abraham Lincoln for the sec- 
ond place on the ticket, but higher honors, graver re- 
sponsibilities, and heavier burdens were to be laid 
upon him. Always hating slavery and abhorring its 
cruelties and crimes, yet his loyalty to the Constitution 
and the Union had not permitted him to become an 
extreme abolitionist. But the repeal of the Missouri 
Compromise and the effort to extend slavery in the 
territories roused him to a new interest in politics. By 
his help the Republicans carried Illinois for Fremont 
and Freedom, and in 1858, that party announced the 
Hon. Abraham Lincoln as the unanimous choice for 
Senator on the expiration of the term of Stephen A. 
Douglas. In his speech of acceptance, he rose uncon- 
sciously to the height of prophecy when he said : 

"A house divided against itself cannot stand. I 
believe this government cannot permanently 
endure half slave and half free. I do not expect 
the Union to be dissolved, — I do not expect the 
house to fall, but I do expect it will cease to be 
divided. It will become all one thing or all the 
other." 

The series of joint debates then carried on between 
Honest Abe and The Little Giant resulted in a popular 
majority for Lincoln, when the election came; but the 
legislative vote stood 54 for Douglas against 46 for 
him. A higher mission was reserved for Lincoln than 
to represent his state in Congress. The Republican 
Convention of i860, after adopting a radical anti- 
slavery platform, chose "the rail-splitter of the 
Sangamon" to be its candidate for President, and he 
accepted, "imploring the assistance of divine Provi- 
dence." A campaign of intense and thrilling excite- 
ment followed, and on November 6, the famous vie- 



50 LESSON II 

tory was won and the Slave Power destined to its final 
overthrow. The voice of the people had been as the 
voice of God, and the next ruler of the nation was to 
be Abraham Lincoln — 

"The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man. 
Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame, 
New birth of our new soil, the first American." 

Secession of Secession was not a new idea, nor a 

South Carolina, purely Southern sentiment! But for 

thirty years, a small class of extreme 
politicians in South Carolina had hinted openly that 
such a course was not only possible but desirable. 
During the presidential campaign of i860, the hints 
became threatening murmurs of disunion. November 
3, the day before the election. Gov. Gist of South 
Carolina addressed a message to the Legislature of 
that state, recommending that in the event of a Re- 
publican victory, a convention be immediately called 
to consider some effective measure of redress. Lincoln 
was elected, this recommendation was adopted, and on 
December 20, South Carolina passed the Ordinance of 
Secession, amid the vain, exultant cries — ''The Union 
is dissolved !" Its declaration of causes is full and ex- 
plicit, dealing chiefly with supposed violations on the 
part of the Northern States of the principles of the 
Constitution, by unwarrantable interference with the 
rights of the states, especially in the matter of 
slavery ; for it was their imperilled institution which 
moved their fear and indignation, and gave motive to 
the plea that it was possible, legal, and right to with- 
draw from the Federal Union. However mistaken 
were their accusations and their logic, it is but justice 
to the Southern point of view to give the following 
extract from the Ordinance of Secession : 



FREEDOM ACHIEVED 51 

"We affirm that these ends for which this Govern- 
ment was instituted have been defeated, and the 
Government itself has been made destructive of 
them by the action of the non-slaveholding 
States. Those States have assumed the right of 
deciding upon the propriety of our domestic insti- 
tutions; and have denied the rights of property 
established in fifteen other states and recognized 
by the Constitution; they have denounced as sin- 
ful the institution of slavery; they have permitted 
the open establishment among them of societies 
whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to 
claim the property of the citizens of other stales. 
They have encouraged and assisted thousands of 
our slaves to leave their homes; and those who le- 
main have been incited by emissaries, books and 
pictures to servile insurrection. For twenty-five 
years, this agitation has been steadily increasing, 
until now it has secured to its aid the power of the 
common Government. Observing the form of the 
Constitution, a sectional party has found, within 
that article establishing the Executive Depart- 
ment, the means of subverting the Constitution it- 
self. A geographical line has been drawn across 
the Union, and all the States north of that line 
have united in the election of a man to the high 
office of President of the United States, whose 
opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He 
is to be entrusted with the administration of the 
Common Government because he has declared 
that 'Government cannot endure permanently 
half slave and half free,' and that the public mind 
must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course 
of ultimate extinction." 

To this the North repHed with explanations, denials, 
and counter-charges of violated law and acts of open 
hostility; and urged upon the South the spirit of 
acquiescence in the election of a genuine Northerner, 
as the North had for thirty years submitted to the 
voice of the people when they chose for President 
either a Southerner or a Northern man with Southern 
principles. But it was too late! The little rift had 
widened, until the music was mute, drowned in the 
discord and dismay of battle ! 



52 LESSON II 

Organization of the In the message sent by Gov. Gist 
Confederacy. to the Legislature of his state is 

found the following sentence : 

"The indications from many of the Southern 
States justify the conclusion that the secession of 
South Carolina will be immediately followed, if 
not adopted simultaneously, by them, and by the 
entire South." 

This prediction was fulfilled in part. Within three 
months after the election of Lincoln, all the Cotton 
States — Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, 
Louisiana, and Texas — had seceded from the Union, 
and made provision for a probable war, by seizing 
nearly all the U. S. forts within their borders, and 
procuring arms and amimunition for their vohmteers. 
In Georgia, the Empire State of the South, there was 
long and earnest discussion, for Alexander H. 
Stephens, the foremost citizen and statesman of the 
state, vigorously opposed the threatened measure on 
the ground that there was no immediate danger from 
the newly-elected President, whose hands would be 
tied by a hostile majority in the Senate, the House, 
and the Supreme Court, and even in the matter of 
obtaining a Cabinet to aid him. But that Gordian 
Knot would be cut when the fulness of time had 
come ! The argument which finally prevailed with 
Georgia was that of one who said, **We can make 
better terms out of the Union than in it." Early in 
February, 1861, a convention of delegates from six 
of the Seceded States met in Montgomery, Ala., and 
there quickly organized a new government called The 
Confederate States of America, and it was only a brief 
matter of time when North Carolina, Virginia, Ten- 
nessee, Arkansas, and Texas should join the new re- 
public. JeflFerson Davis was its President, Alex. H. 



FREEDOM ACHIEVED 53 

Stephens its Vice-president, and it was based upon a 
Constitution closely resembling that of the United 
States, but the provisions regarding slavery were all in 
the interests of its continuance and development. In one 
of Stephens's speeches delivered after he had acceded 
to the action of his state, he contrasted the funda- 
mental ideas underlying the Constitution of 1787 and 
this of the South in 1861. He said : 

"Jefferson and the leading statesmen of his day 
believed slavery wrong in principle, socially, 
morally, and politically. * * * Those ideas, 
however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested 
upon the assumption of the equality of races. 
This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, 
and the government built upon it fell (?) when 
the storm came and the wind blew. Our new 
government is founded upon exactly the opposite 
ideas; its foundations are laid, its corner stone 
rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not 
the equal of the white man; that slavery — sub- 
ordination to the white race — is his natural and 
normal condition. This — our new government — 
is the first in the history of the world based upon 
this great physical, philosophical, and moral 
truth." 

Strange interpretation of Christian teaching and the 
Divine law of humanity and brotherhood ! But the 
stormy winds of the next four years were to prove 
which government was built upon the sand. 

The First Events were crowding thick and fast, and 
Attack. the day of Lincoln's inauguration was 
close at hand. Leaving his home in Spring- 
field, 111., on the nth of February, he started for 
Washington, passing thru the great states of Indiana, 
Ohio, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, 
addressing the people in many cities, and receiving 
everywhere the most enthusiastic demonstrations of 



54 LESSON II 

loyalty and affection. But in Baltimore, there were no 
committees to welcome, no citizens to offer hospitality. 
Ihstead, he passed thru in the night, by special train, 
in response to the urgent entreaties of friends, who 
warned him of a discovered plot to assassinate him as 
he passed thru that city. On the 4th of March, he de- 
livered his inaugural address, one of the great Amer- 
ican classics, in which he stood firmly by the princi- 
ples of national unity and liberty, but appealed most 
urgently for peace. These are his closing words : — 

"I am loth to close. We are not enemies, but 
friends. We must not be enemies. Tho passion 
may have strained, it must not break our bonds 
of affection. The mystic chords of memory, 
stretching from every battlefield and patriot's 
grave to every living heart and hearth-stone all 
over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of 
the Union when again touched, as surely they will 
be, by the better angels of our nature." 

But even as he spoke, the war spirit hovered over 
him, and peace was not to be. April 12, the first shot 
was fired on Fort Sumter ; thirty-four hours of heroic 
resistance and Major Anderson was obliged to sur- 
render to the Confederate summons. The news flashed 
over the wires ; the North was ablaze with patriotic 
indignation, and loyalty to the Union flag. The Slave- 
Holders' Rebellion had begun ! 

PRELIMINARY EMANCIPATION ACTS 

Butler's Then, for four long sad years, grim 

Contrabands. War stalked thru the land. Fields were 
laid waste, cities destroyed, homes and 
hearts made desolate. Courage, loyalty, and mag- 
nificent generalship were limited to neither side. The 
boys in blue responded to the President's call and 
marched to their rallying cry. 



FREEDOM ACHIEVED 55 

"We are coming, Father Abraham, three hundred 
. thousand strong." 

The boys in gray, with equal sincerity, patriotism, and 
devotion, rallied about the Stars and Bars. On both 
sides was there alternate joy and sorrow, shame and 
honor, defeat and victory, but thru it all ran one in- 
creasing purpose to be accomplished in God's own 
good time. But this is not a history of the Civil War, 
only an attempt to trace the successive steps which led 
to final, full and free emancipation. When the war 
began, the controlling thought at the North was to 
preserve the Union, and the question of slavery 
dropped for a time into the background : but Man pro- 
poses, God disposes. Gradually the idea gained force 
that the better hope was. not of a return to conditions 
unchanged, but rather to use the war in some way to 
banish a svstem so un-American and so un-Christian. 
So it proved, tho in unexpected ways. On the 20th of 
May, 1861, Gen. Benjamin F. Butler of Massachu- 
setts was ordered to the command of Fortress Mon- 
roe, and on the evening of the second day after his 
arrival, three Negroes escaped, and gave themselves 
up to the Union picket, complaining that their master, 
Colonel Mallory, was about to take them to North 
Carolina to work on the rebel fortifications there. In 
the morning, they were taken before Gen. Butler, who 
needed laborers, and on the same principle by which 
he would have seized and used Col. Mallory 's spades 
or horses, he declared they were Contraband of War, 
and set them at work. Then the Negroes continued 
to come, in tens, twenties, and thirties, until the vari- 
ous camps contained over 900 Contrabands. A special 
commissioner of Negro aflfairs was appointed ; an ap- 
peal was made to the government, the Secretary of 
War approved, and two months later Congress passed 



56 LESSON II 

the bill for "making free, slaves used by Rebel forces," 
and in March of '63 forbade the army and navy to re- 
turn fugitives. This was the beginning of the end, 
what a Southern Senator called the first "of a series 
of measures loosing all bonds." The word contra- 
band was caught up with delight; the country 
welcomed the happy solution of a troublesome ques- 
tion ; and as a Northern historian has expressed it : 
''An epigram abolished slavery in the United States/' 

Premature Late in August, the month that made 

Proclamatious. the foregoing bill a law, severe war 

measures were taken by Gen. John C. 
Fremont, then in command of the Western department 
of the Union forces. He made his headquarters at 
St. Louis, fortifying this and many other important 
points against the formidable approaches of the 
enemy. For the slave-holders of Missouri were put- 
ting forth every effort to strengthen the Rebel cause 
and forces in that state. Gen. Fremont, believing the 
Union cause in great danger, issued a proclamation 
declaring martial law, threatening death to all armed 
men found within the army lines, confiscating the 
property, and freeing the slaves of all citizens of Mis- 
souri in arms against the government. This pleased 
the extreme loyalists and anti-slavery men, but mad- 
dened the slave-holders and their sympathizers, of 
whom they had many even at the North, and seriously 
interfered with attempts to keep the Border States 
from seceding. President Lincoln disapproved of 
some features of the proclamation, and ordered it so 
modified as to conform to the Act of Congress above 
mentioned, by which only such property could be con- 
fiscated as was used for insurrectionary purposes. In 
May of the following year, a similar measure was 



FREEDOM ACHIEVED 57 

taken by Maj. Gen. David Hunter in the South, when 
he declared the states of Georgia, Florida, and South 
Carolina under martial law, and the slaves held there- 
in to be forever free. Again the President was 
obliged, in spite of the criticism of those who favored 
these hasty and unwarranted acts, to issue a statement 
that this was done without the knowledge and consent 
of the government, and that the decision as to setting 
free the slaves of any state could not be left to com- 
manders in the field. These were trying times for 
the Commander-in-chief ; on one side men were urging 
him to quick action, and condemning his delay ; on the 
other his loyalty to the Constitution, not diminished 
by all his intense hatred of the system, prevented his 
taking any course except that best adapted to preserve 
the Union, with or without slavery. 

rroposcd How deeply the heart of the great 

Compensation. President was moved by the question 

insistently demanding some definite 
solution, how conscientious and God-fearing he was, 
appears in the reply made to a delegation of clergy- 
men from Chicago, who vigorously urged upon him 
some immediate measure for emancipation: "I can 
assure you that the subject is on my mind by day and 
by night, more than any other. Whatever shall ap- 
pear to be God's will, I will do." As realized by him, 
the next step in the Divine purpose was a policy 
recommended by Lincoln in his message of March 6, 
1862. He knew how much depended upon the Border 
States, — Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, — states 
nominally in the Union, but with divided sentiments, 
sending recruits to both armies, and insisting that the 
war should be carried on in such a way as to save 
"their peculiar, Divine and humanizing institution" 



58 LESSON II 

He knew, too, how eagerly the Confederacy hoped to 
win them definitely to its side, and how probable it 
was, that in case of Southern success, they would be 
lost entirely to the Union. The exact purpose of the 
President in his proposal is best seen by some extracts 
from the Resolution presented to Congress : 

"Resolved, That the United States ought to co- 
operate with any state which may adopt gradual 
abolishment of slavery, giving to such state pecu- 
niary aid, to be used by such state, in its dis- 
cretion, to compensate for the inconveniences, 
public and private, produced by such change of 
system. * * * The Federal Government would 
find its highest interest in such a measure, as one 
of the most efficient means of self-preservation. 
♦ * * * The point is not that all the states tol- 
erating slavery would very soon, if at all, initiate 
emancipation, but that while the offer is made to 
all, the more Northern shall, by such initiation, 
make it certain to the more Southern, that in no 
event will the former ever join the latter in their 
proposed confederacy. * * * jjj f^jj yjew of 
my great responsibility to my God and to my 
country, I earnestly beg the attention of Congress 
and the people to the subject." 

Many and contrary were the opinions evoked by this 
plan ; the debate in Congress was short and sharp, but 
the resolution passed, and the nation was committed 
to assist the measure of compensated emancipation in 
any state desiring it. But not a single Slave State 
ever claimed such assistance, tho it was a Missouri 
Senator who had commended the measure as concil- 
iatory and financially desirable, saying in debate, 
"Why, sir, ninety-six days of this war would pay for 
every slave in the states of Missouri, Kentucky, 
Maryland, and the District of Columbia." Three 
months later, Lincoln invited delegates from these 
states to the White House, and appealed for their help 
in the matter, urging that peace, union, and freedom 



FREEDOM ACHIEVED 59 

might thereby be attained. But they made excuses, 
and went their way. The only apparent result of the 
Congressional Act was to prove the willingness of the 
Union to take upon itself the additional burden of 
paying for the slaves held in the Border States. 

Abolition in the D. of C. The transfer of the seat of 
and the Territories. the National Government to 

Washington, on the banks 
of the Potomac, may be accounted as one of the tri- 
umphs of the Slave Power in its earliest development. 
To be established in the midst of a community of 
slave-holders, to be influenced by the demoralizing 
tendencies of an unrighteous system, to have under its 
direct control the affairs of the District of Columbia, 
— all this was to commit the Federal Government to a 
partnership in evil, and to give sanction to the institu- 
tion which it could never have gained from individual 
states alone. It was therefore most fit and significant 
that in this district should have been driven the enter- 
ing wedge of abolition. Henry Wilson of Massachu- 
setts had the honor of introducing in December, 1861, 
the bill wliich in April, 1862, was made a law, and 
provided for immediate emancipation of all slaves in 
the District of Columbia, giving compensation to their 
owners, an average of $300 for each bondman thus 
set free. Naturally the plan roused bitter opposition on 
the part of the Southern Congressmen, and there was 
vigorous and brilliant debate in the legislative halls. A 
new element had entered into the question, a recog- 
nition of what Seward had earlier called a ''higher 
law," an authority higher than any legal enactment; 
the leaven of Christian principle was at work. One 
eloquent advocate of the measure paid a glowing trib- 
ute to the Great Teacher and his message to mankind, 



60 LESSON II 

from which has sprung the new and better civiHzation 
of to-day. 

"What was your Declaration at Philadelphia on 
the 4th of July, 1776, that All Men are created 
equal, but a reiteration of the great truth an- 
nounced by the Apostle of the Nazarene? What 
but this is the sublime principle of your Constitu- 
tion, the equality of all men before the law? 
To-day we deliberate whether we shall make good, 
by legislation, this vital principle of the Constitu- 
tion, here in the capital of the Republic." 

Charles Sumner, again representing the Common- 
wealth of Massachusetts after the years of suffering 
caused by the murderous assault by Brooks of South 
Carolina, on the occasion of his memorable speech in 
1856, The Crime against Kansas, spoke with true 
prophetic utterance when he said : 

"It is the first instalment of the great debt which 
we all owe to an enslaved race, and will be recog- 
nized as one of the victories of humanity. When 
slavery gives way to freedom at the National 
Capital, the good will not stop here, it must pro- 
ceed. What God and nature decree, rebellion can- 
not arrest." 

And it did not stop there ! Two months later, Con- 
gress abolished slavery in all the National Territories, 
thus confirming the Republican doctrine declared be- 
fore the war began, that slavery should be sectional, 
freedom national. One month later still, the President 
gave his approval to the Confiscation Bill, which pro- 
vided that slaves of rebels coming into possession of 
the government should be considered captives of war, 
and given their freedom ; that fugitive slaves should 
not be surrendered ; that persons in the military and 
naval service surrendering fugitives should be dis- 
missed ; and that the President might employ the 
Negroes as he thought best for the suppression of the 



FREEDOM ACHIEVED 61 

Rebellion. Thus, freedom followed in the wake of the 
Union armies, but affected only the rebellious, not the 
loyalist slave-owners. 

EMANCIPAilOIV ACCOMPLISHED 

Lincoln's First On the 19th of August, Horace 
Proclamation. Greeley published a letter to t4ie Pres- 
ident, entitled "llie Prayer of Twenty 
Millions,'^ in which he claimed that there was not one 
champion of the Union cause on the face of this wide 
earth who believed the Rebellion could be put down 
without abolishing slavery, "its inciting cause." Three 
days later, Lincoln issued his memorable reply, con- 
taining the oft-quoted words which showed his official 
attitude upon the question that was rending the 
nation : 

"My paramount object is to save the Union, and 
not eitlier to save or destroy slavery. If I could 
save the Union without freeing any slave, I would 
do it. If I could save it, by freeing all the slaves, 
I would do it, and if I could do it, by freeing some 
and leaving others alone, I would also do that." 

In his heart of hearts, Abraham Lincoln believed that 
without the Union, permanent liberty for either the 
black race or the white would be impossible upon this 
continent. But he believed also that the day was fast 
coming when the necessities of war, as well as of hu- 
manity, would call for such action. Even while he 
wrote his reply to Horace Greeley, there was lying in 
his desk an unsigned proclamation, awaiting some 
Union victory to serve as the seal of Divine approval. 
The summer of '63 was full of the sadness of defeat, 
but when in September news came of McClellan's 
success at Antietam, — "the bloodiest day that America 
ever saw," — and Lee's withdrawal from Maryland, 



62 LESSON II 

the President summoned his Cabinet, told them in 
grave and faltering tones of the promise he had made 
to himself and to his Maker, to proclaim emancipation 
as soon as the rebel army was driven out of Maryland, 
and read to them once more the proclamation which 
has immortalized his name. Suggesting again some 
form of compensation, some method of colonization, 
and still the hope of restoring the disturbed relations 
of the states, the Commander-in-chief of the Army 
and the Navy appointed January i, 1863, as the date 
on which all persons held as slaves in any states or 
parts of states then in rebellion, should be then, 
thencefonvard, and forever free. On the 22d of Sep- 
tember, the nation and the world received this procla- 
mation, signed by the President and his Secretary of 
State, and bearing the great seal of the Republic. The 
nation was moving rapidly toward the goal of uni- 
versal freedom. It was learning, too, ''the iviith 0' 
hein' free.'' 

The Final The reception of this warning proclama- 
Euactment. tion seemed to justify the previous 
hesitation of the President. Some op- 
ponents charged that the act ''would unite the South 
and divide the North." The Democrats raised the 
campaign cry that the War for Union had been 
changed into a War for the Negro, and in spite of the 
joy and rejoicing of the real lovers of humanity every- 
where, the fall elections showed great Republican 
losses in the Middle and Western States. But "the 
kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man" swerved not 
from his conscientious course, and when New Year's 
Day, 1863, arrived, after the hundred days of grace, 
his second and absolute proclamation was issued. This 
made all the slaves in the Rebel States or parts of 



FREEDOM ACHIEVED 63 

states forever free ; enjoined upon the freemen so 
made abstinence from violence except in self-defence, 
and willingness to labor faithfully for reasonable 
wages ; and opened for them the doors of entrance 
into army and navy service. The closing sentence 
deserves exact quotation : 

"And upon this act, sincerely believed to be an 
act of justice, warranted by the Constitution upon 
military necessity, I invoke the considerate judg- 
ment of mankind, and the gracious favor of 
Almighty God." 

Slavery had received its mortal wound, but it was not 
yet dead ; it was to writhe in anguish yet many a 
day. Step by step the slaves were freed as the con- 
quering Union armies advanced thru the rebellious 
states ; but even this edict and the successes of war 
did only what Lincoln said to Greeley, "freed some 
and left others alone." Not until March, 1865, were 
the families of colored soldiers freed by law from the 
power of the slave-masters. Universal freedom was 
not attained until a Constitutional xA.mendment, — the 
famous Thirteenth, — was passed by both Houses, ac- 
cepted by a majority of the states, and formally 
adopted December 18, 1865. Then died slavery in the 
United States, and the land was free, ''clear thru, 
from sea to sea." 

Close of The immediate result of the Great Procla- 
the War. mation was not peace, but a new girding 
for battle, for the "death grapple in the 
darkness 'tunxt old systems and the Word." The 
Seceded States drew even more closely together in 
sympathetic loyalty to what must inevitably be a "lost 
cause;" the North was more and more inspired by 
Christian sentiment, and the spirit of human brother- 



64 LES80N II 

hood ; and foreign nations looked on with deeper in- 
terest and stronger appreciation of the moral elements 
involved, but with a diminishing prospect of inter- 
vention. Two years of bitter conflict were yet to 
come ; years of suffering and sacrifice at home and on 
the field; years in which the South was to fight with 
courage and desperation for the preservation of their 
Confederate cause, and the North with hope and en- 
thusiasm for the freedom of other men ; years in which 
the Negroes were to prove, as slaves and soldiers both, 
that they deserved the freedom granted them at so 
great a cost. When the door of military service was 
opened to them, they entered it by thousands, greatly 
increasing the strength of the Union armies ; they 
were brave, obedient, and faithful, and their war 
record does credit to themselves and their honored 
Northern leaders. Equally faithful were those who 
remained on the plantations, caring for the homes and 
families of masters who had left all behind to follow 
the Stars and Bars; — a humble people worth fighting 
for, worth working for when the war was over. In- 
dependence Day, 1863, saw Lee retreating after the 
decisive battle of the great conflict; and in November 
of that year, at the dedication of the Cemetery conse- 
crated to the burial of those brave soldiers killed at 
Gettyshiirg, Lincoln delivered an address which ranks 
with the world's masterpieces of eloquence and power. 
These are its closing words : 

"It is for us to be here dedicated to the great task 
remaining before us, — that from these honored 
dead we take increased devotion to that cause 
for which they gave the last full measure of de- 
votion, — that we here highly resolve that these 
dead shall not have died in vain, — that this nation, 
under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, — 
and that government of the people, by the people, 
for the people, shall not perish from the earth," 



FREEDOM ACHIEVED 66 

Even greater and more appealing to the hearts of his 
loyal people was Lincoln's second Inaugural, — "the 
finest State paper in all history" — delivered in March, 
1865, while the war was still dragging out its weary 
length, but with victory close at hand. Humility and 
faith, charity and conviction mark the words which 
came from the heart of a president who spoke as never 
American President has spoken before or since : 

"The Almighty has his own purposes. 'Woe unto 
the world because of offenses; for it must needs 
be that offenses come; but woe to that man by 
whom the offense cometh.' If we shall suppose 
that American slavery is one of those offenses 
which, in the providence of God, must needs come, 
but which, having continued through his appointed 
time, he now wills to remove, and that he gives to 
both North and South this terrible war, as the woe 
due to those by whom the offense came, shall we 
discern therein any departure from those Divine 
attributes which the believers in a living God al- 
ways ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, — 
fervently do we pray, — that this mighty scourge 
of war may speedily pass away. Yet if God wills 
that it continue until all the wealth piled by the 
bondman's 250 years of unrequited toil shall be 
sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with 
the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the 
sword; as was said 3000 years ago, so still it must 
be said: 'The judgments of the Lord are true and 
righteous altogether.' With malice toward none, 
with charity for all; with firmness in the right, 
as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on 
to finish the work we are in, to bind up the Na- 
tion's wounds, to care for him who shall have 
borne the battle, and for his widow and his 
orphans, — to do all which may achieve and cher- 
ish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and 
with all nations." 

It was not the Divine will that the struggle should con- 
tinue. The end was near. April 9, at Appomatox 
Court House, Lee — the Christian hero of the Confed- 
eracy — surrendered to Grant — the magnanimous com- 



66 LE880N II 

mander of the Union forces. On the 14th, while Gen. 
Anderson was replacing the old flag on Fort Sumter 
on the anniversary of its capture just four years pre- 
vious, the formal proclamation went over the land that 
the war was ended. The Union was saved, and the 
fetters had fallen from 4,000,000 slaves. 

"Bow down, dear Land, for thou has found release! 
Thy God, in these distempered days, 
Hath taught thee the sure wisdom of His ways, 

And through thine enemies hath wrought thy peace! 

Bow down in prayer and praise! 
No poorest in thy borders but may now 
Lift to the juster skies a man's enfranchised brow. 

O Beautiful! my Country! ours once more!" 







Our Martyr Chikf 



Lesson III 
Development Begun 



RECOASTRUCTIOIV BY LAW 

The Fourteenth The joy and thanksgiving of peace 
Amendment. were soon rudely disturbed by foul 

assassination and bitter mourning. At 
the close of the very day on which the news was spread 
abroad that this cruel zvar was really over, the wires 
flashed over the land a message that plunged the 
nation into the depths of grief and indignation, of 
horror and humiliation. Lincoln had fallen at the 
hand of a ruthless murderer, whose dramatic cry, 
''Sic semper tyrannis/' seemed to sound the knell of 
doom to Cabinet and Federal Government. But tho 
that was spared a suffering people, yet the loss of 

"Our Martyr Chief 
Whom late the nation he had led 
With ashes on her head. 

Wept with the passion of an angry grief," 

was a sore trial to faith and hope. Christian senti- 
ment asked, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do 
right?" Political opinion was divided as to the merits 
of Lincoln's probably lenient policy in dealing with 
the conquered States of the Confederacy, and some 
even tried to interpret the Divine Providence from 
this standpoint; but all eyes turned anxiously to 
Andrew Johnson, who had quietly taken the oath of 



68 LE880N III 

office the day following the assassination. The first 
great question to be answered was, — Are the Seceded 
States to be considered as still in the Union as "way- 
ward sisters," or are they out of the Union needing to 
be brought back again ? If the latter, then howf One 
sad chapter in our nation's history must needs be 
darkly written before that question could be fully an- 
swered, and the wayward states restored to right and 
practical relations with the Union they had left. Harsh 
and bitter conflicts were there ; wrong and suffering 
on the part of both the whites and blacks ; but in this 
brief record, reference can be made to a few only of 
those measures most vitally important to the Freed- 
men. One of the conditions of restoration was the 
adoption of The Thirteenth Amendment, and when 
that was declared accomplished in December, 1865, 
legal emancipation was achieved. But the cruel laws 
passed by nearly all the Southern States, — the Black 
Code of that period, — made freedom more a theory 
than a fact. The rights and privileges of free men 
were denied the blacks ; they were compelled, under 
heavy penalties, to hire themselves to white planters 
on the latters' own terms ; forbidden to leave their 
place of employment without written permission, or 
to be absent after dark without arrest and punishment. 
Should they leave their place of service, they might 
be lodged in jail by any white man, and the costs of 
identification and recovery charged to themselves; 
they were not allowed to have in their possession a 
gun, pistol, or knife ; to keep live-stock, or raise gar- 
den produce for themselves, or even to trade in such 
provisions. To be found with corn, cotton, or meat of 
any kind in their possession was considered a sure 
sign of theft, and they were treated accordingly ; and 
a plantation Negro found unemployed by a white was 



DEVELOPMENT BEGUN 69 

treated as a vagabond. No meetings of any kind 
could be held without a license, and the weight of 
burdensome restriction was unbearable. Disappointed 
at Johnson's policy, Congress took upon itself the 
work of reconstruction, and in view of existing condi- 
tions in the South, passed in June, 1866, The Four- 
teenth Amendment to the Constitution in five sections, 
the first of which made the Negro a citizen. 

"Sec. I. All persons born or naturalized in the 
United States, and subject to the jurisdiction there- 
of are citizens of the United States, and of the 
State wherein they reside. No State shall make 
or enforce any law which shall abridge the 
privileges or immunities of citizens of the United 
States, nor shall any State deprive any person of 
life, liberty, or property, without due process of 
law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction 
the equal protection of the laws." 

The Fifteenth Had the Southern States seen fit to 
Amendment. adopt at once the Fourteenth Amend- 
ment, the story of succeeding years 
would doubtless have been written in far different 
phrase. But they hoped for better terms, rejected the 
amendment, and brought upon themselves the harsher 
measures of reconstruction which Congress then de- 
vised. Military governments were instituted in all the 
Confederate States except Tennessee, which alone had 
met the requirement of the proposed amendment, — 
and the Commanders were instructed to arrange for 
new state organizations by enrolling as voters all 
adult citizens, black or white, who should send dele- 
gates to a convention. This convention was to pre- 
pare a new Constitution, permitting the same condi- 
tion of suffrage ; and when this Constitution was rati- 
fied by the popular vote, and approved by Congress; 
and when the Legislature, elected by virtue of it, rati- 



70 LE880N III 

fied the Fourteenth Amendment, then each state so re- 
organized should be restored to the Union. For fif- 
teen months or more, the reluctant states were under 
martial law, and it was not until July, 1870, that the 
process of reconstruction was considered complete. 
Meanwhile, measures were pending in the National 
Congress looking toward universal manhood suffrage 
for the Negroes, so recently freed from slavery. As 
early as December, 1865, a bill was introduced for the 
purpose of granting this privilege within the borders 
of the District of Columbia, and after much opposi- 
tion was passed ; a few days later, another was passed, 
conferring this right upon the black citizens of the 
Territories. Again the wedge had entered, and the 
final outcome was not far to seek. Two years later, 
(1869) Mr. Boutwell of Massachusetts presented the 
resolution which, as finally adopted, became The Fif- 
teenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United 
States. Bitter opponents there were, indeed, but the 
most telling arguments in favor were based by some 
upon the belief that suffrage is a natural right ; others 
thought that the Negroes who had fought so valiantly 
in the war deserved the full rights of citizenship; and 
others still, that the Freedmen needed the ballot for 
protection against oppression. The politicians hoped 
much from large additional votes for the Republican 
party which carried the measure; but in spite of that 
element of partisan desire, the better judgment of the 
North was on the side of the measure, inspired by just, 
humane, and Christian motives. The words in which 
President Grant, in March, 1870, conveyed to Con- 
gress by special message the fact that the necessary 
three-fourths of the states had ratified the amend- 
ment, show the spirit which inspired, and the hope 
which animated the people of the North. 



DEVELOPMENT BEGUN 71 

"The measure which makes at once four millions 
of the people voters who were heretofore declared 
by the highest tribunal in the land not eligible to 
become so, with the assertion that, at the time of 
the Declaration of Independence, was fixed and 
universal in the civilized portion of the white race, 
and regarded as an axiom in morals as well as in 
politics, that black men had no rights which white 
men were bound to respect, is indeed a measure of 
grander importance than any other one act of the 
kind from the foundation of our free government 
to the present time. Institutions like ours, in 
which all power is derived directly from the peo- 
ple, must depend mainly upon their intelligence, 
patriotism, and industry. I call the attention, 
therefore, of the newly enfranchised race to the 
importance of their striving in every honorable 
manner to make themselves worthy of their new 
privilege. To a race more favored, heretofore, 
by our laws, I would say, withhold no legal privi- 
lege of advancement to the new citizen." 

The Reign of Had this sentiment prevailed, in North 
Terror. and South aHke, this paragraph had 

not been written. Some there were, 
among the defeated champions of a "lost cause," 
who accepted the inevitable, and like Gen. Longstreet 
could say, "If every one will meet the crisis with 
proper appreciation of our condition and obligations, 
the sun will rise tomorrow on a happy people." But 
the revolution had been too violent, the transition too 
swift, and the proud spirit of the ruling class at the 
South could not brook the sudden rise to power and 
equalitv of those who for centuries had been their 
servants, slaves, and chattels. From the North came 
many unprincipled adventurers, with all their worldly 
goods in one small bag, but greedy for gain of wealth 
and power. The hated Carpet-baggers deserved per- 
haps the contempt and ostracism they encotmtered, as 
they made a tool of the Negro, and wrought political 
havoc in the land of Lee and Stonewall Jackson ; but 



72 LE8S0N III 

it was the ignorant, unskilled and dreaded black who 
suffered most at the hands of those who would prevent 
his exercise of the newly granted privileges. Very 
soon after the close of the war, secret societies had 
been formed for this purpose, bearing such suggestive 
names as The Brotherhood, The Pale Faces, The In- 
visible Empire, The Kiiights of the White Camellia; 
but all were merged at last into the dark and terrible 
organization known as the Klu Klux Klan. Started 
at first, half in fun, by some young men in Tennessee, 
simply to frighten the superstitious blacks and keep 
them from their all too common pilfering expeditions, 
it became the deadly instrument of terror, torture, and 
death, for the furtherance of political ends. Masked 
riders, well armed and wearing long white gowns, 
patroled the country in the darkness of night, fright- 
ening like ghosts the timid Northerner or Negro, 
breaking into cabins, whipping, shooting, even hanging 
some defenseless occupant for offenses real or im- 
aginary. These brutal outrages were most frequent 
in the years from 1868 to 1870, but gradually ceased, 
owing partly to the severe measures taken by the gov- 
ernment at Washington, and partly to the more legiti- 
mate means taken by the Southern whites to regain 
political and industrial supremacy. Dark as is this 
picture of a reign of terror, the provocation must be 
pictured, too, as George S. Merriam has done it, in 
this striking phrase, in "The Negro and the Nation" : 

"It was the spectacle of rude blacks, yesterday 
picking cotton or driving mules, sitting in the 
legislators' seats, and executive offices of Richmond 
and Columbia, holding places of power among the 
people of Lee and Calhoun. Fancy the people of 
Massachusetts, were the State-house on Beacon 
Hill suddenly occupied by Italians, Polish and 
Russian laborers, — placed and kept there by a for- 
eign conqueror!" 



DEVELOPMENT BEGUN 73 

BY CARE AND EDUCATION 

Local When the Contrabands at Fortress 

Organizations. Monroe were employed by Gen. Butler 
upon the Union fortifications, and were 
so accounted Freedmen, the question at once arose in 
the minds of thoughtful, far-seeing philanthropists and 
statesmen as to the care and treatment of those made 
free by the fortunes of war. The later decrees of 
emancipation only emphasized the question, for free- 
dom did not change the character of the slave, and 
with all his loyalty, docility and faithfulness, there 
were the ever present dangers of poverty, homeless- 
ness, and ignorance. But the spirit of the Good 
Samaritan was not lacking, and many a man — and wo- 
man, too, left comfortable homes in the North to give 
help and cheer and instruction to their dark brethren 
in the South. Societies for the assistance of the Freed- 
men sprang up like magic, sending clothing, books, 
and teachers to the needy places where such early ef- 
forts could avail. How deep and true and wide spread 
was the Missionary impulse, may be inferred from 
this long list of organizations formed for this purpose, 
— a list by no means complete, but significant of the 
growing sense of brotherhood and obligation to a race 
long held in bondage. Besides the Educational Com- 
mission of Boston, the National Freedmen's Relief 
Association of New York, and the Fort Royal Relief 
Commission of Philadelphia, first formed, there were 
the New England Freedman's Aid Society, American 
Freedman's Aid Commission, Freedmen's Union Com- 
mission, American Union Commission, Pennsylvania 
Freedmen's Relief Association, Friends' Relief Asso- 
ciation, Baltimore Association for the Moral and Edu- 
cational Improvement of the Colored People, Dela- 



74 LESSON III 

ware Association, Frccdmen's Aid Association of 
Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, 
Western Frecdmen's Aid Commission, and North- 
western Frecdmens Aid Commission. Even in Great 
Britain, there were similar associations contributing 
thousands of dollars, and in London, in 1865, repre- 
sentatives of these met to form a National Committee 
"to consolidate and extend the action already taken 
for the relief of the freed Negroes of America." In 
this country, too, consolidation followed later in the 
same year. All these organizations, however, efficient 
as they were, sending out over 3,000 men and women 
for this special form of service, and expending mil- 
lions of dollars, were, as intended, but temporary in 
their operations, and were dissolved in 1869, leaving 
a heritage of Christian service yet to be rendered by 
other Societies equipped for more permanent and en- 
during labors in the Lord. 

The Freedman's Numerous as were the voluntary 
Bnrean. organizations responding to the un- 

spoken appeal of the millions emerg- 
ing into the bewildering glare of freedom, it was 
evident that governmental aid and authority were 
necessary to produce the most effective results. In 
1864, a convention of delegates from seven Western 
Freedman's Associations met in Indianapolis, and 
among other results of their gathering there, was the 
presentation to President Lincoln of a memorial, 
showing the difficulty of their work without any rep- 
resentative on the field of both the government and 
their own societies, and urging the appointment of a 
supervising agent who should represent both. This 
need had been felt by Massachusetts statesmen long 
before, and twelve days after the Great Proclamation 



DEVELOPMENT BEGUN 75 

went into effect, Henry Wilson presented in the Sen- 
ate a memorial from the Emancipation League of 
Massachusetts, urging the establishment of a Bureau 
of Emancipation. Bills were introduced, amendments 
offered, discussions violently carried on, until finally, 
on the last day of the 38th Congress, March 3, 1865, 
an Act was passed to establish a Bureau of Refugees, 
Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands, — one of the last 
acts approved by Lincoln before his tragic death. One 
of the closing speeches of the debate, delivered by Mr. 
Kelley of Pennsylvania illustrates the conditions that 
warranted this Congressional action : 

"It is not often given to a Legislature to perform 
an act such as we are now to pass upon. We have 
four million people in poverty, because our laws 
have denied them the right to acquire property; 
in ignorance, because our laws have made it a fel- 
ony to instruct them; without organized habits, be- 
cause war has broken the shackles which bound 
them, and has released them from the plantations 
which were destined to be their world. We are to 
organize them into society; we are to guide them, 
as the guardian guides his ward for a brief period, 
until they can acquire habits, and become confident 
and capable of self-control; we are to watch over 
them; and, if we do, we have from their conduct 
in the field and in the school, evidence that they 
will more than repay our labor." 

Gen. O. O. Howard, a Christian soldier who had dis- 
tinguished himself at Gettysburg, and had been chosen 
by Sherman to lead one of the columns in his famous 
March to the Sea, was appointed by President John- 
son Commissioner of the new Bureau, and chose nine 
assistants with headquarters at various important 
Southern cities. To supply bodily needs, to guide and 
instruct in the matter of labor, to settle disputes and 
grievances, to protect against insult and outrage, and 
to further all the efforts of benevolent and religious 



76 LESSON III 

organizations ; — these were some of the duties of the 
new Commission. That there were some mistakes, 
and some inefficient or corrupt agents cannot be de- 
nied; but in a work so tremendous and so untried, it 
must needs be that offenses come. The record of good 
accornpHshed is marvelous. Special attention was 
given to the subject of education, and a report made 
in 1870 of the five years' active service of the Bureau 
showed that 4,239 schools had been established, 9,307 
teachers employed, 247,333 pupils instructed, and 654 
school buildings furnished. The Freedmen them- 
selves owned 592 school buildings, and supported 
1,324 schools, — some industrial, some High and Nor- 
mal schools. School superintendents were appointed 
for each state, and of the more than $1,000,000 ex- 
pended for buildings, repairs, and teachers, $200,000 
was raised by the people just out of slavery, — money 
raised in many cases by small tuition fees of from ten 
to fifty cents a month. What a prophecy of the eager 
multitudes who to-day are crowding the doors of all 
the multiplied institutions for the education and the 
elevation of a race reached, as yet, only on its outer 
edges ! 

Educational A name revered alike in England and 
Boards. America is that of George Peahody, 

princely merchant and philanthropist. 
Born in 1795, in South Danvers, Mass. — now called 
Peabody — his only education was obtained in the dis- 
trict school. At eleven he was in a grocer's shop, at 
fifteen, in a haberdasher's, at twenty-two, a partner in 
a Baltimore firm. Removing to London, he made a 
large fortune as merchant and broker, and his gifts to 
local and public enterprises on both sides of the sea, 
were munificent. In 1867 and 1869, he gave sums 



DEVELOPMENT BEGUN 77 

amounting to nearly $3,500,000 to be controlled and 
expended by a board of fifteen trustees for the pro- 
motion of "intellectual, moral, or industrial education 
in the most destitute portions of the Southern States." 
At first, the income of the fund was used chiefly to 
secure the establishment of public school systems for 
free education ; when that was accomplished, the 
money was used for the training of teachers thru 
Normal Schools, and Teachers' Institutes. For more 
than thirty years the fund has been managed by men 
of national reputation for the nation's good, but by the 
terms of the gift, the whole amount is soon to be dis- 
tributed where most needed, and then the Corporation 

of the Peabody Fund will cease to exist. In 1882, 

John F. Slater, a cotton manufacturer of Connecticut, 
who had amassed a large fortune, gave the sum of 
$1,000,000 for the benefit of the Freedmen. There is 
the beauty of fitness in the fact that the man whose 
father and uncle had founded the cotton manufactur- 
ing industry in the United States, should have been 
not unmindful of the black workers in the cotton fields 
of the South, whose labor made such an industry pos- 
sible. In his communication to the Board of Trustees, 
Mr. Slater stated the purpose of the gift in these 
words : 

"The general object which I desire to have ex- 
clusively pursued, is the uplifting of the lately- 
emancipated population of the Southern States 
and their posterity by conferring on them the 
blessings of Christian education. The disabilities 
formerly suffered by these people, and their singu- 
lar patip.nce and fidelity iv the great crisis of the vat ion 
establish a just claim on the sympathy and good 
will of humane and patriotic men. I cannot but 
feel the compassion that is due in view of their 
prevailing ignorance, which exists by no fault 0/ 
their own.^^ 



78 LE880N III 

The first president of the Board of Trustees was 
Ex-President Hayes, and that office is now filled by 
Daniel C. Oilman, formerly of Johns Hopkins Uni- 
versity. So remarkable has been the management of 
the fund that in spite of the already large expendi- 
tures, it has increased to $1,500,000, and is still used 
to aid existing institutions to extend industrial educa- 
tion and to prepare teachers. Not the guardian of 

a fund, but the promoter of wise educational policies 
is the Southern Education Board of the Conference 
for Education in the South, of which Robert C. 
Ogden of New York is the present chairman. Its ob- 
ject is to rouse public opinion and to secure improved 
legislation and increased revenues for the public 
schools of the South, — one of the greatest needs of the 
time. Surely, it is a far cry to the Black Code of the 
South, when it was made a criminal offense to teach 
the simplest lessons to a member of a race suffering 
and enslaved. 

NOTABLE NEGROES 

Toossaint— Strangely enough, there are still 

the Hero of Hayti. those who deny to the Negro the 

ability to make good use of his 
greatly increased facilities for development ; who as- 
sign him to an essentially lower level than the white 
man occupies ; and who, like one of old, ask even now, 
"To what purpose is this waste?" Brief sketches of a 
few black men who have attained extraordinary distinc- 
tion in various spheres of achievement, may serve to 
illustrate the possibilities of a race so long doomed to 
ignorance and inferiority. — Look back to that fair 
island in the Caribbean Sea where slavery found its 
first foothold in the Western World, and there by the 



DEVELOPMENT BEGUN 79 

fitness of fate, see the first uprising of the blacks for 
independence, and their first great leader, governor 
and statesman. Francois Dominique Toussaint was a 
full-blooded Negro, born in 1743, of slave parents on 
a plantation in the north of that island which the 
native Caribs called Hayti, but which Columbus had 
named Hispaniola, when its beauty caused him to tell 
Queen Isabella that he had found the garden of Eden. 
The French early recognized its attractiveness and 
settled in the western part, obtaining title thereto by 
treaty with Spain in 1697. When the French Revolu- 
tion broke out, there was a population of nearly half 
a million, all slaves except 38,000 Europeans, and 
28,000 free people of color, mostly mulattoes. When 
the French Government, in 1790, decreed political free- 
dom to these last, the island was in a ferment of ex- 
citement; the whites indignant, the mulattoes crazed 
with joy, and the slaves rising in savage insurrection, 
marching upon the Europeans with a white infant on 
a spear head as their standard. The decree was re- 
voked, England and Spain entered the conflict to 
assist the whites ; the French suffered frequent re- 
verses until, in 1793, they proclaimed universal free- 
dom, and Toussaint appeared upon the scene. He was 
now a man of fifty, who had been first a coachman, 
then overseer of a sugar factory, taught to read and 
write, knowing a little Latin and Mathematics, and 
counting among his favorite books Epictetus, Plutarch, 
and Military Memoirs. This insurgent leader won 
over the blacks to the side of the French, and the 
grateful governor hearing of this said, "Cet homme 
fait Oliver tiire par tout ;" (This man makes an opening 
everywhere). Then his soldiers named him UOuver- 
ture — the opening. Peace was restored, law and or- 
der re-established, agriculture and commerce flour- 



80 LESSON III 

ished under his marvelous administrative ability, and 
he became president of an independent republic called 
San Domingo from its principal city. To the conven- 
tion which drafted its constitution he said: 

"Put at the head of the chapter on commerce that 
the ports of San Domingo are open to the trade of 
the world. Make it the first line of my constitu- 
tion that I know no difference between religious 
beliefs." 

But Napoleon became jealous of his black rival, sent 
an army to overthrow the republic, and to re-enslave 
the whole black population. Toussaint was treacher- 
ously made captive, and carried over the seas to 
languish ten months in a horrible French prison ; then, 
dying too slowly for his royal jailer, he was left four 
days without food or drink, and April 27, 1803, was 
found dead — he of whom a Spanish general said, "He 
was the purest soul God ever put into a body ;" and of 
whom history says, **He never broke his word." 
Wendell Phillips has paid The Hero of Hayti this 
eloquent and thrilling tribute: 

"Now, blue-eyed Saxon, proud of your race, go 
back with me to the commencement of the century, 
and select what statesman you please. Let him be 
either American or European; let him have a brain 
the result of six generations of culture; let him 
have the ripest training of university routine; let 
him add to it the better education of practical life; 
crown his temples with the silver of seventy years, 
— and show me the man of Saxon lineage for 
whom his most sanguine admirers will wreathe a 
laurel as rich as embittered foes have placed on 
the brow of this Negro; rare military skill, pro- 
found knowledge of human nature, content to blot 
out all party distinctions, and trust a state to the 
blood of its sons, — anticipating Sir Robert Peel 
by fifty years, and taking his station by the side of 
Roger Williams before any Englishman or Ameri- 
can had won the right, — and yet this is the record 




Douglass, thk Okatoh 



DEVELOPMENT BEGUN 81 

which the history of rival states makes up for this 
inspired black of St. Domingo. 

Frederick Douglass— Stranger than fiction, more fas- 
the Orator. cinating than a modern novel 

is the hfe story of another 
"inspired black," who, when San Domingo, genera- 
tions later, appHed to the United States for annexation, 
was one of the Commission sent there to investigate 
conditions, and later still, to represent the government 
as Minister to the Republic of Hayti. Born about 
1817 on Tuckahoe plantation in Eastern Maryland, 
Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, slave son of 
a slave mother, spent the first twenty-three years of 
his life in bondage and obscurity; — a bondage in 
which he experienced all the horrors of a hateful sys- 
tem, separation from family and friends, grief, loneli- 
ness, cold and hunger, cruel floggings, and imprison- 
ment for escapes attempted but not realized. Even 
as a child he asked himself, "Why am I a slave?" and 
was told that God up in the sky had made all things, 
and had made black people to be slaves and white peo- 
ple to be masters ! ! ! But his childish logic questioned 
this, especially when he saw that not all white people 
were masters, nor all blacks slaves. One kind mis- 
tress ventured to teach him to read, until harshly for- 
bidden by an angry husband who said, 

"If he learns to read the Bible, it will forever un- 
fit him to be a slave." 

But the seed was sown, and the clever ingenuity of an 
ambitious youth helped him to use his white play- 
mates as unconscious teachers ; and in a ship yard the 
timbers marked with capital letters furnished his first 
copy for writing lessons ; then fences and pavements, 
and his little Master Tommy's copy books with ample 



82 LEi^SON III 

spaces between the lines, served his purpose as he 
learned the art of writing. Very early he heard the 
word abolition and when the dictionary failed to ex- 
plain, The Baltimore American gave him information 
that on a certain day a great number of petitions had 
been presented to Congress, praying for the abolition 
of slavery in the District of Columbia, and of the 
slave trade between the States of the Union. Then the 
star of Hope rose in his sky, and at the beginning of 
the year 1836, he made a solemn vow that that year 
should not close without an earnest effort to attain his 
liberty. That attempt failed, but another was more 
successful, and on September 4, 1838, the fugitive, hav- 
ing reached New York, began life as a free man. But 
not there ; a friendly officer of the Underground 
Railway helped him on his way to New Bedford 
where he hoped to ply his- calker's trade. Between 
Baltimore and New Bedford the name Bailey had 
been dropped for that of Johnson, but in the latter 
city, his colored friend and host, having just read with 
delight The Lady of the Lake, chose for him the more 
distinctive and distinguished name of Douglass, a 
name never tarnished but rather illumined by its new 
representative. Even in New Bedford, race prejudice 
was too strong to permit the practice of his trade, but 
work of various kinds furnished a precarious living 
for the young Douglass ; and the reading of The Lib- 
erator furnished his mind with new thoughts, and his 
soul with new hopes for his race. In 1841, he at- 
tended an Anti-Slavery meeting in Nantucket, and 
was persuaded by one who had heard his fervid elo- 
quence as an exhorter in the Colored Methodist 
Church of New Bedford, to tell his story. That was 
the hour of his emergence from obscurity, the begin- 
ning of a public career of long and unrivalled interest. 



DEVELOPMENT BEGUN 83 

As agent of the Anti-Slavery Society he attended 
hundreds of conventions, and spoke in all the cities of 
the East. As writer and orator he used his multiply- 
ing talents for the help and succor of his people, on 
both sides of the water, receiving in Great Britain the 
courteous treatment of equality and brotherhood so 
often wanting in his native land. When the War was 
over, and political rights were his, places of influence 
and power were opened to him, because of rare ability 
and honest character. As Commissioner to San Do- 
mingo, member of the council for the government of 
the District of Columbia, Elector at large of the State 
of New York, orator on Decoration Day at Arlington 
near the monument to the unknown loyal dead, at the 
unveiling of the Lincoln monument in Washington, 
and in Madison Square, New York, by Lincoln's 
statue, pall-bearer at the funeral of Vice-President 
Wilson, Marshal of District of Columbia appointed 
•by President Hayes, Recorder of Deeds under Presi- 
dent Garfield, and Minister to Hayti under Harrison, 
— he spent a long and useful life in the service of his 
people and this nation, and died full of years and 
honors at the National Capital, February 20, 1895. 

"A hush is over all the teeming lists, 
And there is pause, a breath-space in the strife; 

A spirit brave has passed beyond the mists 
And vapors that obscure the sun of life. 

And Ethiopia, with bosom torn, 

Laments the passing of her noblest born. 



Oh, Douglass, thou has passed beyond the shore, 

But still thy voice is ringing o'er the gale! 
Thou'st taught thy race how high her hopes may soar, 

And bade her seek the heights, nor faint, nor fail. 
She will not fail, she heeds thy stirring cry. 
She knows thy guardian spirit will be nigh, 
And rising from beneath the chast'ning rod, 
She stretches out her bleeding hands to God!" 



84 LESSON III 

Dunbar — Beautiful would this tribute be from any 
the Poet. source, but it gains an added luster and a 
deeper meaning, coming from the heart 
and pen of one of Douglass's own race. The poetic 
temperament cannot be denied the Negro, child of the 
tropics, with his love of song and dance, his quick 
emotions, his vivid imagination, and his sensitiveness 
to the humor and the pathos of life. Whose is the 
blame that so long a time had passed before it became 
possible for one to give adequate expression to the 
sentiments within ; for the crude verses of Phyllis 
Wheatley to be followed by the graceful, polished lyrics 
of Paul Laurence Dunbar f Even the former need not 
be passed over in silence, for it is a fact of no slight 
interest that in 1773, there was published in England 
a book of Poems on Various Subjects^ Religious and 
Moral by Phyllis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. 
John Wheatley of Boston in New England. Phyllis 
was born in Africa, brought to this country in 1761, 
purchased and educated by Mrs. Wheatley, and nearly 
a century after her poems were reprinted in Boston, 
the first real poet of his race was born in Dayton, 
Ohio, June 2y, 1872. Dunbar's parents had been 
slaves, the father escaping from bondage in Kentucky 
to freedom in Canada, — the mother set free by the 
Civil War. The home was one of poverty, but the 
father taught himself to read, and found in history 
his chief delight. The mother loved poetry and 
shared the boy's youthful tastes and aspirations, 
appreciating his earliest literary ventures in prose 
sketches and tales of fiction. A High School course 
at Dayton was followed by a wonderfully successful 
career in literature and journalism, and in 1897 he 
was appointed to the staflf of the Librarian of Con- 
gress. These novels, The Uncalled, The Spirit of the 



DEVELOPMENT BEGUN 85 

Gods, and The Fanatics, illustrate his work in prose, 
but of far greater power and beauty are the poems. 
Among the published volumes are Oak and Ivy, 
Majors and Minors, Lyrics of Lowly Life, Lyrics of 
the Hearth Side, Folks from Dixie, and Ccihin and 
Field, — names suggestive of the life he describes 
and the pictures he paints. Sometimes he imitated the 
quaint accent of the Negro dialect, as no one else 
could do, as in ''When de corn pone's hot/' "When 
Malindy Sings" and the little poem he calls a Hymn: 

"O li'l' lamb out in de col', 
De Mastah call you to de fol', 

O li'l' lamb! 
He hyeah you bleatin' on de hill; 
Come hyeah an' keep yo' mou'nin,' still, 

O li'l' lamb! 

"De Mastah sen' de Shepherd fo'f. 
He wandah souf, he wandah no'f, 

O li'l' lamb! 
He wandah eas', he wandah wes', 
De win' a-wrenchin' at his breas', 

O li'l' lamb! 

"Oh, tell de Shepherd whaih you hide; 
He want you walkin' by his side, 

O li'l' lamb! 
He know you weak, he know you so'. 
But come, don' stay away no mo', 

O li'l' lamb! 

"An' af ah while de lamb he hyeah 
De Shepherd's voice a-callin' cleah, — 

Sweet li'l lamb! 
He answah f om de brambles thick, 
'O Shepherd, I's a-comin' quick' — 

O li'l' lamb!" 

Sometimes he sang in purest, truest English lines 
that knew no race nor color, save when the theme was 
one that beat in sympathetic heart throbs with his 
people. But the songs have ceased ; February 9, 1906, 
the singer, thru whom the inarticulate music of a 



86 LESSON III 

humble folk found sweet expression, "passed beyond 
the mists and vapors that obscure the sun of life." 

Sympathy. 

"I know what the caged bird feels, alas! 

When the sun is bright on the upland slopes; 
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass. 
And the river flows like a stream of glass; 

When the first bird sings and the first bud opes, 
And the faint perfume from the chalice steals — 
I know what the caged bird feels! 

"I know why the caged bird beats his wing 
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars; 

For he must fly back to his perch and cling 

When he fain would be on the bough a-swing; 
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars, 

And they pulse again with a keener sting — 

I know why he beats his wing! 

"I know why the caged bird sings, ah me, 

When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore, — 

When he beats his bars and he would be free; 

It is not a carol of joy or glee. 

But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core, 

But a plea that upward to Heaven he flings — 

I know why the caged bird sings!" 

Tanner — No American artist in Paris is more talked 
the Artist, about or more respected than Henry 
Ossawa Tanner, an artist unique in that 
he is of Negro blood and birth. His father was Ben- 
jamin Tucker Tanner, a bishop of the African M. E. 
Church, having oversight of the work in Canada, 
Bermuda, and the West Indies, — a man of wide 
scholarship and unusual literary ability, contributor to 
many important periodicals and editor of the African 
Methodist Quarterly which he made one of the lead- 
ing journals of the country. The son was born in 
Pittsburg, Pa., June 21, 1859, received his earliest art 
education at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, 



DEVELOPMENT BEGUN 87 

then studied under the best of masters in Paris, — Jean 
Paul Laurens and Benjamin Constant. For some time 
he Hved in Jerusalem and Bethlehem to see things and 
to paint them as he saw, in the Land of the Bible from 
which he has taken his choicest subjects. In his 
student days, he often carried off the honors of his 
class ; many medals and prizes have been awarded 
him ; and his pictures have been hung in many a Salon 
Exhibition. — His first great picture, Daniel in the 
Lion's Den, was hung there in 1896; The Raising of 
Lazarus in 1897 was bought by the French Govern- 
ment for the Luxembourg Gallery, and in due time 
will probably be transferred to a higher and more 
honorable position in the Louvre, A study of Christ 
and Nicodemus bought in 1900 for the Temple Col- 
lection in the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, has 
been called his masterpiece, and one critic says of it : 

"So subtle is the painter's power as not only to 
make one feel that which the characters of the 
picture, Christ and Nicodemus, are exchanging 
— one may even dare to think their thoughts after 
them." 

Another picture, larger and even more remarkable for 
its original treatment and suggestive beauty is The 
Annunciation, hanging now in Memorial Hall in Fair- 
mount Park, Philadelphia. Instead of an angel ap- 
pearing to the astonished Mary, it is a wonderful 
radiance streaming in from an unknown source, 
waking the startled girl to a sense of the coming of 
the Divine in human form, — The Incarnation. In the 
Carnegie Gallery in Pittsburg is The Flight of Judas, 
a subject seldom represented, but in which Tanner has 
succeeded in giving a sense of the horror of living or 
dying, after having betrayed thfe Holy One. Within 
the year just passed, Tanner has exhibited at the 



88 LE880N III 

Chicago Art Institute a picture, Two Disciples at the 
Tomb, which won the prize for the best American 
painting. American as he is, this famous Negro 
artist resides in Paris, partly for the better practise of 
his art, and partly for the better social conditions ex- 
isting there. Across the water, there is no sharply 
drawn color line, no social ostracism due to race, but 
there is given Honor to whom honor is due. 

Coleridge-Taylor— As in painting, so in music, the 
the Composer. Negro race seems just coming to 

its own ; and tho Samuel Cole- 
ridge-Taylor is not an American, his genius and his 
successful musical career present an illustration of the 
possibilities of the colored people, the more remark- 
able, as it is, perhaps, less widely known. Born in 
England, August 15, 1875, son of a West African 
Negro father and an English mother, the young mu- 
latto studied at the Royal College of Music, and with 
famous English professors. Very early he was com- 
missioned to write for three choir festivals, and then 
for the greater English festivals at Leeds and Bir- 
mingham. His compositions number already more 
than forty-eight, including several poems set to music, 
and The Atonement, a sacred cantata. Most import- 
ant of his works, however, is the Hiazuatha Cantata, 
three subjects from Longfellow's beautiful poem set 
to music, — Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, The Death of 
Minnehaha, and Hiawatha's Departure. When this 
v/as produced at the great Albert Hall in London in 
March, 1900, it was received with enthusiasm, and the 
composer warmly applauded. When it was presented 
to a music-loving audience in the United States, two 
years later, this was the appreciative comment of an 
impartial critic. 



DEVELOPMENT BEGUN 89 

"Some of the melodies are fresh and inspiring, 
and at its best, it rises to really inspiring heights, 
fully justifying Mr. Coleridge-Taylor's claim to a 
place among the most original and gifted of the 
younger English composers." 



Chesnutt — Such distinction as Dunbar and Tanner 
the NoYelist have won for themselves in the fields 
of poetry and painting, that has Ches- 
nutt won in the field of fiction. Charles Waddell 
Chesnutt was born in Cleveland, Ohio, June 20, 1858, 
of free parents whose thrift and industry saved him 
from such youthful struggles with poverty as had 
fallen to the lot of Dunbar. He was educated in 
North Carolina, and there became principal of the 
State Normal School at Favetteville. After a brief 
journalistic career in New York, he returned to his 
native city and was there admitted to the bar in 1887. 
'But the practice of his profession could not restrain 
the literary impulse, and the desire to present with 
sympathetic interest the condition and the problem of 
his people. Having shared their fortunes partially, 
and knowing their life by instinct and observation, he 
has reproduced in his novels and short stories the hu- 
mor and the tragedy of both the old time plantation 
Negro, and the Negro of to-day. His best known 
works are The Life of Frederick Douglass, The House 
behind the Cedars, The Conjure Woman, The Wife 
of his Youth, and The Marrozv of Tradition. To have 
the Negro problem presented by a Negro novelist, and 
that in a manner so delicate and artistic as to place his 
novels on a level with the standard works of recent 
years, and his short stories among the very best, is one 
of the surest proofs of the intellectual and literary 
possibilities of the race from which he sprang. 



90 LESSON III 

WASHINGTON— LEADER OF MEN 

His When the beautiful monument which stands 

Training, on Boston Common facing the State House 
was dedicated in 1897 to the memory of 
Robert Gould Shaw, the gallant colonel of a gallant 
regiment, — the 54th Massachusetts, first colored regi- 
ment from the North — Music Hall was packed from 
floor to gallery with one of the most distinguished 
audiences that ever graced a distinguished occasion. 
Gov. Wolcott presided and in introducing the chief 
speaker said : 

**Booker T. Washington received his Harvard A. 
M. last June; the first of his race to receive an 
honorary degree from the oldest university of the 
land, and this for wise leadership of his peoph.^^ 

As Frederick Douglass was the foremost colored man 
of his generation, so is Booker Washington of the 
present ; but more than scholar and orator, educator 
and administrator, is he a wise leader of men, of men 
both black and white, both Northerners and South- 
erners. To bring such industrial order out of chaos, 
such harmony out of political strife and social confu- 
sion, such commercial success out of poverty, sloth, 
and ignorance, and best of all such a change in the 
white man's attitude toward the Negro, — this is the 
marvelous achievement of Booker Washington, Pres- 
ident of the Tiiskegee Normal and Industrial In- 
stitute, one of the greatest of living Americans. His 
life story, too, reads like a romance, as he tells it in 
his fascinating autobiography, — Up from Slavery. 
Born in Franklin County, Virginia, about 1858 or '59, 
of an unknown father, and a slave mother whose an- 
cestors had suffered all the horrors of a slave ship in 
passing from Africa to America, his earliest days were 



DEVELOPMENT BEGUN 91 

Spent in a typical log cabin. His first knowledge that 
he was a slave came to him as he heard his mother 
praying earnestly that Lincoln and the Union armies 
might be victorious, and that she and her children 
might be free. Her prayer was answered, and when 
freedom was declared, she joined her husband in 
Maiden, West Va., whe»e even the little boys were set 
to work in the salt furnace. An intense desire to learn 
to read found its first gratification in an old blue-backed 
Webster's Spelling Book ; then, in the first school for 
Negro children ever opened in that part of the coun- 
try. There, the boy who had been always called 
"Booker" observed that the other boys responded to 
the roll-call with at least two names ; but before his 
turn came, he had an inspiration, and calmly responded 
"Booker Washington." Later he learned that his 
mother had given him the name Booker Taliaferro, 
and the forgotten part was restored. Now the full 
name Booker Taliaferro Washington has attained an 
illustrious significance little dreamed of in those deso- 
late days. In spite of the struggle with pinching 
poverty, the industrious, ambitious youth finally suc- 
ceeded in entering the Hampton Normal and Agri- 
cultural Institute, where his intellectual and industrial 
training was supplemented by the strong, inspiring 
influence of General Armstrong, its founder and 
principal. Janitor and student, he learned the dignity 
of labor, as well as the value of mental discipline, and 
to that lesson is largely due his wonderful success. 

His After two years of teaching in Maiden, and 
Work, a year of furtlier study in Washington, he 
was summoned to Hampton to deliver a post- 
graduate commencement address ; then came a call to 
serve as instructor, and to have charge of seventy-five 



92 LESSON III 

young Indians just admitted to the institution. In 
1881, Gen. Armstrong, in response to an appeal from 
some gentlemen in Alabama, recommended Mr. 
Washington as the most suitable person to take charge 
of the proposed Normal School for the colored people 
in the little town of Tuskegee. That was the begin- 
ning of a career of unparalleled activity and achieve- 
ment. The school opened with thirty pupils in a little 
shanty so dilapidated that when it rained, one of the 
older students would leave his lessons to hold an um- 
brella over the head of the teacher hearing recitations. 
That was in '81, and tho at the starts it seemed like 
making bricks without straw, when he had no money 
and the school had no money, yet in 1907 the Institute 
owns and occupies 2000 acres of land, 83 buildings, — 
dormitories, class-rooms, shops, and barns ; — and 
1800 eager, earnest students are learning both how to 
live, and how to earn a living. In addition to Mr. 
Washington's public appeals in behalf of the school 
so dear to his heart, he has delivered many important 
addresses, one of which gave him a national reputa- 
tion. It was a five minute speech at the opening of 
the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposi- 
tion, September 18, 1895, remarkable as the first time 
in the history of the Negro, when one of that race had 
spoken from the same platform with white Southern 
men and women on any great national occasion. The 
surprising enthusiasm with which it was received was 
an indication that he had in great measure achieved 
his earnest purpose to "say something that would 
cement the friendship of the races and bring about 
heartv co-operation between them." After that, hon- 
ors and opportunities crowded thick and fast upon 
him ; — appointment as one of the Judges of Award in 
the Department of Education at the exposition; invi- 




•* 



The Shaw Monument 



DEVELOPMENT BEGUN 93 

tations to address Business Men's Associations, the 
leading Colleges of the country, and great audiences 
in Chicago at the peace celebration following the 
Spanish-American War; a European trip for much- 
needed rest and recreation forced upon him by the 
generosity of Northern white friends; gracious and 
hospitable entertainment by men of highest rank and 
influence in France and England ; an honorary degree 
from Harvard University ; a much prized visit from 
President McKinley and his Cabinet to the little city 
of Tuskegee and the great institution it contains; and 
best of all the cordial respect and honest admiration of 
his own people, and of those once their owners and 
their masters. Twenty-five years after his first arrival 
in Richmond on his way to Hampton when, penniless 
and forlorn, he slept night after night under a board 
sidewalk, the colored people of that city gave him an 
immense reception in the Academy of Music, a build- 
ing never before opened to their race. To hear his 
address there came, besides hundreds of other dis- 
tinguished white citizens, the City Council, the State 
Legislature and State officials ; and to the men of two 
races, he gave a message of hope and cheer for both. 
Well may he have said and they assented, ''What hath 
God wrought!" 

His Tribute to the When Mr. Washington spoke in 
Negro Soldiery. Boston, at the dedication of the 

Shaw monument, among the Ne- 
gro soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment in 
places of honor on the platform, was William H. 
Carney of New Bedford, the brave color-bearer who 
held the American flag at Fort Wagner and exclaimed 
after the battle was over, ''The old Hag never touched 
the ground." Turning to him and his comrades, the 



94 LE880N III 

orator roused the emotions of all present to such a 
pitch of fervor that it was Gov. Wolcott himself who 
first sprang to his feet and shouted, "Three cheers to 
Booker T. Washington," as he said : 

"To you, to the scarred and scattered remnants of 
the Fifty-Fourth, who, with empty sleeve and 
wanting leg, have honored this occasion with 
your presence, to you, your commander is not 
dead. Tho Boston erected no monument and his- 
tory recorded no story, in you and in the loyal 
race you represent, Robert Gould Shaw would 
have a monument which time could not wear 
away." 

W^en he delivered his great speech to 16,000 persons 
in the Chicago Auditorium after the Spanish-Ameri- 
can War, The Times Herald reported his address as 
follows : — 

He pictured the Negro choosing slavery rather 
than extinction; recalled Crispus Attucks shed- 
ding his blood at the beginning of the American 
Revolution that white Americans might be free 
while hlack Americans remained in slavery; re- 
hearsed the conduct of the Negroes with Jackson 
at New Orleans; drew a vivid and pathetic picture 
of the Southern slaves protecting and supporting 
the families of their masters while the latter were 
fighting to perpetuate black slavery; recounted 
the bravery of colored troops at Port Hudson and 
Forts Wagner and Pillow, and praised the heroism 
of the black regiments that stormed El Caney and 
Santiago to give freedom to the enslaved people 
of Cuba, forgetting for the time being, the unjust 
discrimination that law and custom make against 
them in their own country. 

In all these things, the speaker declared his 
race had chosen the better part. And then he 
made his eloquent appeal to the consciences of 
white Americans: *^ When you have gotten the full 
story of the heroic conduct of the Negro in the Spanish- 
American War^ have heard it from the lips of the North- 
ern soldier and Southern soldier, from ex-abolitionist and 
ex-master: then decide within yourselves whether a race that 
is thus willing to die for its country should not he given 
the highest opportunity to live for its country. ^^ 



DEVELOPMENT BEGUN 95 

SOME WORTHY ACHIEVEMENTS 

In Art In December, 1863, the Washington 

and Industry, correspondent of the Nezv York Tri- 
bune gave to the world the story of the 
Negro who took a striking foreman's place in the 
foundry where the bronze castings were being com- 
pleted for the Statue of Liberty on the Capitol. 

"The black master builder lifted tlie ponderous 
uncouth masses, and bolted them together, joint 
by joint, piece by piece, till they blended into the 
majestic Freedom who today lifts her head in the 
blue clouds above Washington, invoking a bene- 
diction upon the imperilled Republic! Was there 
a prophecy in that moment when the slave became 
the artist, and with rare poetic justice recon- 
structed the beautiful symbol of freedom for 
America?" 

At the Atlanta Exposition of 1895, a large and attrac- 
tive building devoted wholly to showing the progress 
of the free Negro, and equal in beauty and fitness to 
any on the grounds, was designed and erected wholly 
by Negro mechanics. The plans for the Negro 
Exposition building at the Jamestown Exposition of 
1907 are the work of W. Sidney Pittman of Washing- 
ton, D. C, a graduate of the Birmingham High 
School and Tuskegee Institute, said to be the first of 
his race to have plans accepted by the U. S. govern- 
ment. At the St. Louis Exposition, one of the 

most prominent figures in the musical world was 
Lteiit. Walter H. Loving, the Negro band-master. A 
native of St. Paul, Minn., he studied in Boston, or- 
ganized two army bands before going to the Philip- 
pines where he mastered three languages in order to 
make himself understood by the natives, and gathered 
together his famous Filipino Band of 80 pieces. Eight 
hours a day, this band rehearsed on the ship that 



96 LESSON III 

brought them to America; and when the Exposition 
opened, they could play a thousand selections. In the 
musical contest entered by the very best bands in the 
world, the second prize was given to Lov-ing, over 
such famous organizations as Sousa's Band and the 
Royal Band of England, and many critics thought the 
Filipinos deserved the first prize, awarded to the 

French musicians. One of the most successful 

inventors in the country is Granville T. Woods, a 
Negro electrician with thirty-five mechanical devices 
to his credit, among them a steam boiler furnace, four 
kinds of telegraph apparatus, four electric railway im- 
provements, two electric brakes, a telephone trans- 
mitter in use by the Bell Telephone Co., and an elec- 
trical controller system used on the Manhattan 

Elevated Railway. The number of successful 

farmers, contractors, real estate dealers, merchants, 
and bankers, is constantly increasing, and the recent 
organization of The National Negro Business League 
marks a tremendous industrial and commercial ad- 
vance from the days when tobacco raising and cotton 
picking were almost the only possible occupations for 
those who worked under the overseer's lash in the 
bonds of slavery. 

In Law and Of the nearly or quite 800 Negro law- 
Learning, yers in the country, practising with 
varying degrees of success, the most 
successful is probably Edward H. Morris of Chicago. 
A native of Kentucky, he was admitted to the bar at 
the early age of twenty-one, and later removed to the 
great western city where he has built up a practice 
worth at least $20,000 a year, besides gaining for him- 
self a more than local reputation in winning an im- 
portant suit between Cook County and the City of 



DEVELOPMENT BEGUN 97 

Chicago, and another involving the question of taxing 
the net receipts of large insurance companies. — The 
rise of the Negro physician, too, within the last 
few years, has been one of the most surprising signs 
of progress in a race so long restrained from aspiring 
to the learned professions. Not long ago, a Negro 
led his class in the Harvard Medical School; another, 
in Philadelphia, passed the best state medical exam- 
ination for years; but the most conspicuous example 
of Negro skill and success is Daniel H. Williams of 
Chicago, physician and surgeon. In 1893, a fight 
occurred in which one of the combatants received a 
stab wound in the heart. Dr. Williams was first to 
come to the relief of the man apparently doomed to 
death, and his success in sewing up the man's heart was 
the first recorded instance in the history of medicine. 
Other cases under his care have attracted widespread 
medical interest ; and positions of honor and responsi- 
bility have been his, as head of the Freedman's hos- 
pital in Washington, attending surgeon to the Cook 
County and Provident hospitals in Chicago, and mem- 
ber of the Illinois State Board of Health. As 

teacher and instructor, the educated Negro has found 
much work and usefulness, but few have attained to 
the distinction of Kelly Miller, Professor of Mathe- 
matics in Howard University, Washington, D. C. 
Born a freeman two years after the Great Proclama- 
tion, he attended the county schools of South Carolina, 
and early showed an unusual keenness of mind for 
mathematical pursuits ; later, he studied at the Naval 
Observatory, and took a post-graduate course at Johns 
Hopkins, before entering upon his duties as professor. 
Pie is not only an inspiring teacher, a writer for such 
periodicals as The Forum and The Outlook, a speaker 
of power and logic, but a student of the race prob- 



9S LESSON III 

lems of this country and of the world, and a leader of 
his people, whose ideal and advice for them is, Duty 
and not Destiny. Another scholar of high posi- 
tion and lofty purpose is JV. E. Burghardt DuBois. 
Born in Great Harrington, Mass., he has had not only 
the educational advantages of its High School, but of 
Fisk University, of Harvard College, and of post- 
graduate studies in Berlin. He now occupies the 
Chair of Sociology in Atlanta University. Broadly 
cultured and scientifically exact in his researches, he 
has given himself as devotedly to raising the standard 
of higher education and equal privilege for the Ne- 
groes, as the principal of Tuskegee, to their industrial 
and commercial elevation. One of the most notable 
books of recent years is The Souls of Black Folk, in 
which the interest of the facts and the surpassing 
beauty of its literary style are only equalled by the 
tragic pathos of his sympathy, his hopes, and his long- 
ings for his people. 

In Politics When the Fifteenth Amendment 
and Religion, opened the political arena to colored 
aspirants, they were not slow to enter, 
and in view of their long years of ignorance, and in- 
experience, the wonder is — not that there were some- 
times incompetence and pretension, but that so many 
filled acceptably positions of honor and influence. Per- 
haps the best known colored senator was Blanche K. 
Bruce — born a slave in 1841, freed by the war, and 
educated at Oberlin College, who served the State of 
Mississippi from 1875 to 1881, when he was appoint- 
ed Register of the U. S. Treasury by President James 
A. Garfield. In the same year was appointed Min- 
ister to Liberia a colored man with an extraordinary 
career, Henry Highland Garnett, a slave, a classical 



DEVELOPMENT BEGUN ^9 

Student, ridiculed for his knowledge of Latin and 
Greek and robbed in a Xew Hampshire seminary, 
a theological student in Troy, X. Y., a missionary to 
Jamaica in the West Indies, and pastor of the Shiloh 
Presbyterian Church in Xew York City. There his 
house narrowly escaped the riots of 1863, simply be- 
cause his daughter wrenched the door-plate from his 
door. He is said to have been the first colored man 
who ever spoke in public at the Capitol in Washington, 
and one of the most.eloc^uent. Honored in two conti- 
nents, he died at Monrovia in 1882. ^vlinister of the 
United States to a civilized nation in the land frcm 

which his ancestors had been stolen. One of tlie 

ablest diplomats of the Xegro race was Ebcnezer D. 
Bassett of Connecticut birth and education, a classical 
scholar, and principal of an Institute for colored youth 
at Philadelphia, who served his country for nearly 
nine years as Minister and Consul-General at Hayti ; 
and after his return was promoted by the Haytian 
government to serve there as Consul at X^ew York. 
When Prof. Bassett left the school in Philadel- 
phia, his place was filled by Richard T. Greener, the 
first Xegro graduate of Harvard University, who won 
not only its diploma, but high honors and well-de- 
served prizes ; since then, besides filling many posts of 
honor as teacher, lawyer, writer, and editor, he has 
represented the United States as Consul at Vladlvo- 

stock with credit to himself and to his race. One 

of the most recent appointments of special interest is 
that made in 1906 by President Roosevelt of W. T. 
Vernon as Register of the Treasury. The son of 
slave parents in Missouri, he gained an education for 
himself, taught in his native state for ten years, and 
then took charge of Western University. Quindaro. 
Kansas. Beginning with six X^gro pupils, he has done 



100 LESSON III 

in Quindaro in lesser degree what Booker Washington 
has done at Tuskegee, and when he left to assume his 
new position there were fourteen teachers and 200 
pupils. The degrees of M. A. and LL. D. have 
been conferred upon him, and hereafter his signature 
must appear on all the treasury notes and bonds of 

this rich and prosperous country. The religious 

instincts of the Negroes were very early developed, 
but when race prejudice shut them out in great meas- 
ure from existing churches, the African M. E. Church 
was founded in Philadelphia in 1 816. It grew rapidly 
and was full of zeal and consecration, having even in 
1846 three educational societies and three missionary 
societies. One of its best known bishops in the early 
days was Daniel Payne, called the "Little Father of a 
million African Methodists"; and Bishop Arnetfs 
name and face have become friendly and familiar to 

the Christian Endeavor hosts of later years. 

Among the colored Baptist preachers of America the 
names of Duke William Anderson, and Leonard A. 
Grimes stand out with well deserved distinction. Their 
history is worth the reading. In the present gen- 
eration, the list of zealous, consecrated, cultivated 
pastors and preachers would far exceed the limits of a 
paragraph; but one representative clergyman may be 
mentioned as typical of the moral earnestness, the 
scholarly attainments, and the spiritual purpose of a 
great class of Negro ministers. Francis J. Grimke 
now of Washington, "as able and promising a student 
as Princeton ever had," is a successful pastor, author, 
contributor to New York Independent and Evangelist, 
school committeeman of the District of Columbia, 
trustee of Howard University, preacher at Hampton 
and Tuskegee, and a man who says of his loyal efforts 
in behalf of his poor struggling race: 



DEVELOPMENT BEGUN 101 

"In spite of all the tremendous odds against us, 
I am not disposed, however, to become despondent. 
I have faith in God; faith in the race, and faith 
in the ultimate triumph of right." 

In Woman's Could the full story of the v^omen of 
Sphere. African descent be written, from Phyllis 

Wheatley to the latest graduate of Hartshorn or of 
Spelman, doubtless many a latent spark of genius 
might be discovered. Sometimes the spark has 
kindled into flame, and recognition and renown have 
followed. Such was the rare good fortune of Edmonia 
Lewis, the Negro sculptress, herself the prophecy of 
her sisters' possibilities. Born about 1840 in New 
York State, of lowly parents, she was early left an 
orphan, poor but ambitious. During a visit to Boston, 
she saw a statue of Benjamin Franklin which woke 
within her a longing and a hope. '7, too, can make a 
stone man," she said. Turning instinctively to the 
great friend of her race, William Lloyd Garrison, he 
gave her letters to Mr. Brackett, a Boston sculptor, 
who received her kindly, gave her some clay and a 
model of the human foot, and bade her make one like 
it. Her first attempt was broken up, and she was told 
to try again. Then she triumphed, won an assured 
position as an artist, and the admiration of both 
America and Europe. Her first work was a bust of CoL 
Shazv exhibited in Boston in 1865 ; her second. The 
Freedzi'oman; and then in 1867, she opened a studio 
in Rome where her work attracted such appreciative 
attention that Harriet Hosmer, Charlotte Cushman, 
and other famous women became her friends and help- 
ers. Among her finest works are Hagar in the Wil- 
derness, Madonna and Angels, busts of Longfellow 
the poet, and John Brozvn the martyr, medallion por- 
trait of Wendell Phillips, The Death of Cleopatra, 
The Marriage of Hiazvatha, and a portrait bust of 



102 LESSON III 

Abraham Lincoln, Emancipator of her people. 

Two typical women of the present, cultivated and 
capable, attractive and influential, are Mrs. Booker T. 
Washington, and Mary Church Terrell; the former a 
graduate of Fisk University, the latter of Oberlin, a 
college which never closed its doors to colored stu- 
dents from its opening day in 1833, but sent out many 
a scholarly Negro before any other leading college had 
consented to instruct him. Mrs. Washington is her 
husband's efficient helper in all matters pertaining to 
the work of Tuskegee, besides carrying on Mothers' 
Meetings in the town, plantation work for men, wo- 
men and children in the vicinity, managing a local 
Woman's Club, and filling such positions as President 
of Southern Colored Women's Clubs, and Chairman 
of the Executive Committee of the National Federa- 
tion of Colored Women's Clubs. Mrs. Terrell is a 

Trustee of Hartshorn Memorial College, the first wo- 
man appointed on the Education Board of the District 
of Columbia, a speaker of unusual grace and power 
who surprised the International Association for the 
Advancement of Women recently meeting in Berlin, 
by addressing the assembly in three languages. Both 
these women have close upon their hearts the welfare 
of their people, and especially of the women. The 
wonderful record of the last fifty years is one for 
which they may be deeply glad and grateful. The un- 
numbered women serving their generation as devoted 
wives and mothers, as skilful nurses and physicans, as 
successful teachers and consecrated missionariCvS — 
these are the hope and prophecy of coming years. In 
woman's sphere essentially has there been great need 
and great endeavor ; and the aim of The National 
Association of Colored Women is, "More homes, 
better homes, purer homes." 



DEVELOPMENT BEGUN 103 

A FEW FIGUBES 

The Little of inspiration as there is in mere facts 
Facts, and figures, yet they point the way to clearer 
knowledge and to deeper realization of the 
underlying forces, and the interwoven hopes and fears. 
Less than forty years after the bondman had become 
a free man, the United States census could record such 
marvelous facts as these. In a race that then was 
ignorant, perforce, as its enslaved members had not 
been allowed the privileges of school attendance, now 
55 per cent can read and write. Where poverty was 
as pitiful as ignorance, now members of the race own 
property worth over $600,000,000, largely in farms 
covering an area equal to that of New England. 
Where industry found its outlet in the lowest forms of 
manual labor, now the record of 1900 enumerates 
among the Negroes, 82 bankers and brokers, 52 archi- 
tects and designers, 236 artists, 212 dentists, 185 elec- 
tricians, 120 civil engineers and surveyors, 210 jour- 
nalists, 719 government officials, 728 lawyers, 1,734 
physicians and surgeons, 395 stenographers, 475 book- 
keepers, 15,530 clergymen, 21,268 teachers, 156,370 
farm owners, 1,311 stock raisers, 1,186 manufacturers 
and superintendents, and 149 wholesale merchants. 
This for the adults; for the youth, note the following: 
over 1,095,774 were enrolled in the schools of the 
country, 586,767 of them young women ; 12,200 at- 
tended the hundred public high schools for colored 
young people, and nearly 40,000 entered the secondary 
and higher schools established for them. Now, in this 
year of grace, 1907, a full-blooded Negro, Alton Leroy 
Locke, a Harvard student, has won, over fifty appli- 
cants, the Rhodes Scholarship allotted this year to the 
state of Pennsylvania ; a young man who purposes to 



104 LESSON III 

return to America after his three years at Oxford to 
"devote my entire time to the uplifting of my race." 
"VMiat progress, what advancement, what hope for the 
future ! 

The But zvhat are these among so many? 

Application. Much as education has accomplished 
thru consecrated teachers from the 
North, thru princely gifts of generous men, thru pub- 
lic-spirited school boards and progressive leaders, the 
present need is great. In spite of these thousands won 
from illiteracy to intelligence, the menace of ignorance 
will still remain until education keeps pace with the 
needs. So rapidly has the race increased in numbers, 
that there are more illiterate blacks in the South to-day 
than in 1865. Bright stars have shone out here and 
there in the darkness ; individuals have towered above 
the rank and file ; but not until the whole heaven of 
the race is bright, and the rank and file raised to their 
possible height, will the need of effort cease, or the 
work of elevation and development approach comple- 
tion. What Browning said of Man as man may well 
apply to the black men as a race — Browning, the poet 
in whose veins flowed drops of Negro blood, and 
whose ancestral acres were voluntarily lost because his 
father hated slavery. 

"Progress is 
The law of life, man is not man as yet, 
Nor shall I deem his object served, his end 
Attained, his genuine strength put fairly forth 
While only here and there a star dispels 
The darkness, here and there a tov/ering mind 
O'erlooks its prostrate fellows." 




A SiTB.iixT Kou Missiox Work 



Lesson IV 
Missions Multiplied 



THE GOSPEL APPLIED 



A Contrast. "If no other consideration had convinced 
me of the value of the Christian life, the 
Christlike work which the Church of all denomi- 
nations in America has done during the last 
thirty-five years for the elevation of the black 
man, would have made me a Christian. In a 
large degree, it has been the pennies, the nickels, 
and the dimes which have come from the Sunday 
Schools, the C. E. societies, and the Missionary 
societies, as well as from the Church proper, that 
have helped to elevate the Negro at so rapid a 
rate." 

Such is the tribute of Booker T. Washington in these 
latter days to the purity of motive, the earnestness of 
purpose, and the measure of success of the greatest 
of all organizations in its efforts to fulfil the terms of 
the Great Commission, and to win assent to the great 
truth that God hath made of one blood all nations of 
men for to dwell on all the face of the earth. Contrast 
with this an extract from the autobiography of Fred- 
erick Douglass, to note the changes wrought by the 
passing years. 

"Two hundred years ago, the pious Doctor God- 
win dared affirm that it was not a sin to baptize 
a Negro, and won for him the rite of baptism. 
It was a small concession to his manhood; but it 
was strongly resisted by the slave holders of 
Jamaica and Virginia. In this they were logical 



106 LESSON /"P 

in their argument, but they were not logical in 
their object. They saw plainly that to concede the 
Negro's right to baptism was to receive him into 
the Christian Church, and make him a brother in 
Christ; and hence they opposed the first step 
sternly and bitterly. So long as they could keep 
him beyond the circle of human brotherhood, 
they could scourge him to toil, as a beast of bur- 
den, with a good Christian conscience, and with- 
out reproach. 'What!' said they, 'baptize a 
Negro? preposterous!' Nevertheless, the Negro 
was baptized and admitted to church fellowship; 
and tho, for a long time, his soul belonged to God, 
his body to his master, and he, poor fellow, had 
nothing left for himself, he is at last not only bap- 
tized, but emancipated and enfranchised," 

A strange perversity of the human intellect and con- 
science was to be found both North and South in the 
estimate -of Negro needs and privileges, but the Chris- 
tian principle developed more rapidly in the North ; 
and, as long before the war the question of slavery 
and Negro rights had caused several of the great de- 
nominations to be rent asunder, the divisions still 
exist, btit a new day is dawning and the bond of unity 
is being strengthened in a common effort to make the 
people zvhich sat in darkness see great light. If "Anti- 
Slavery was the child of Christian faith," Missionary 
effort was its younger brother. Scarcely had Gen. 
Butler coined his famous phrase. Contraband of War, 
and set free the slaves who flocked to Fortress Mon- 
roe, when the question arose as to the supply of their 
spiritual as well as temporal needs. Individual work- 
ers were very early in the field, and of Dr. Solomon 
Peck, a distinguished Baptist clergyman of Massachu- 
setts, who preached and taught in Beaufort, S. C, it 
is said : 

"Of narrow means, and yet in the main defraying 
his own expenses, this man of apostolic faith and 
life, to whose labors both hemispheres bear wit- 



MISSIONS MULTIPLIED 107 

ness, left his home to guide and comfort this poor 
and shepherdless flock; and to him belongs and 
ever will belong, the distinguished honor of being 
the first minister of Christ to enter the field which 
our arms had opened." 



American On the 2ist of August, 1861, the chap- 
Missionary lain of a regiment stationed at Newport 
Association. News, sent a letter to the Y. M. C. A. of 
New York City, urging the appointment 
of a Missionary to labor "among the slaves that had 
been liberated in Virginia." The letter was given over 
to the American Missionary Association, whose exec- 
utive committee recognized at once the importance of 
the appeal, and sent Rev. L. C. Lockwood to this new 
field of labor, thus beginning a work among the 
Freedmen that has grown with the years, and is still 
advancing with marvelous success. This Association 
had its real beginning in a romantic chapter of our 
early history — that strange happening in New London 
harbor in September, 1839. A queer-looking vessel 
had rounded the point, and was terrifying the inhab- 
itants by its curious maneuvers. When a revenue cut- 
ter went out to capture what seemed a pirate ship, it 
was found to be a runaway Spanish slave-ship, the 
Amistad, having on board five white men and forty- 
two Negroes. Not a word of English could white or 
black man speak ; but later investigations led to the 
startling revelation that these blacks, stolen from the 
west coast of Africa, taken to Cuba, sold and shipped 
for transportation, had risen under a gigantic native 
leader of their tribe, killed the captain, set adrift the 
crew, then drifted for months, and at last appeared in 
Long Island Sound. Committed to the New Haven 
jail, the Negroes appealed to the United States for 
protection; the Spanish claimed both ship and cargo; 



108 LESSON IV 

and the legal complications caused the trial to be pro- 
longed for nearly two years. Meanwhile the Amistad 
Committee was formed to defend the interests of the 
captives, and engaged such eminent counsel as John 
Quincy Adams of Massachusetts, and Roger Baldwin 
of Connecticut. The decision was finally reached that 
they be sent back to Africa, and in 1842, they were 
returned by the Committee, accompanied by three 
Christian Missionaries who founded the Mendi Mis- 
sion, one of the first American Missions in the dark 

continent. The Amistad Committee then became 

a Missionary Committee, and four years later, uniting 
with four other missionary societies, it grew into the 
A. M. A., which was formally organized in Albany — 
"to conduct Christian missionary and educational 
operations, and to diffuse a knowledge of the Holy 
Scriptures." Missionaries were soon sent South, but 
the terror caused by John Brown's raid resulted in 
their expulsion from all the Slave States. Undenomi- 
national at first, this association was chosen in 1865 
by the National Council of Congregational Churches 
as the best agency to carry on its work among the 
Freedmen. The foreign missionary enterprises were 
given up as home work developed, and to-day the 

word is still Onward. From the first day-school 

among the Freedmen established by Mr. Lockwood, 
September 17, 1861, to the long Hst of institutions in 
active operation to-day, many of them made possible 
by the million and a half dollars given the A. M. A. 
by Daniel Hand — a Southern merchant of Connecti- 
cut birth, whose Union sentiments compelled him to 
flee to the North at the opening of the war — one may 
trace the good hand of our God in the uplifting of a 
fallen race. Some of the leading schools and colleges, 
besides the fiftv Normal and Graded Schools, under 



MISSIONS MULTIPLIED 109 

the care of the A. M. A. are these : Fisk University, 
Nashville, Tenn., famous for its Jubilee singers: Tal- 
ladega College, Talladega, Ala., one of the very first 
mission schools to introduce industrial training; 
Straight University, New Orleans, La.; Tougaloo 
University, Tougaloo, Miss.; Tillotson College, Aus- 
tin, Tex.; Piedmont College, Dcmorest, Ga. Two 
theological seminaries are maintained, one at Atlanta, 
Ga., and one at Hozvard University, Washington, D. 
C. The men and women who founded these schools, 
and the 200 churches of the Association ; the 700 
teachers and preachers still working bravely and hope- 
fully for the blacks, well deserve the tribute paid them 
(and others like them) by the preacher of the annual 
sermon at the meeting of the A. M. A. in Oberlin, in 
1906. 

"They saw the Negro not as he was, but as he 
was to become. They looked up from fields sod- 
den with the inheritance of slavery to more 
radiant uplands. They saw upon his face the 
light which St, Gaudens saw, and which is caught 
imperishably upon the bronze faces of those un- 
resting ranks marching by Shaw as he stands in 
youth immortal where Beacon Hill stoops toward 
Boston Common. And they saw that wherever 
those faces, lit with a new light, were to march, 
they would never reach the appointed goal, un- 
less strength marched by their side, unless wis- 
dom led them, unless love suffered for them, and 
unless courage was willing to die for them." 

Hampton and Of all the forces making for the real 
Gen. Armstrong, emancipation of the Negro — moral 

and industrial — the work of Samuel 
Chapman Armstrong must be placed among the fore- 
most. Born in the Hawaiian Islands in 1839, of mis- 
sionary parents, his boy life was vigorous, well- 
trained, and strongly impressed by the unselfish, con- 



110 LESSON IV 

secrated spirit of his home. Observant of the native 
habits, he drew upon this knowledge in formulating 
plans for the work which became his life-long mission. 
Graduating from Williams College in 1862, he at once 
entered the Union army, fought at Gettysburg, com- 
manded a regiment of Negro troops, and became a 
brigadier general. The War over, he entered the ser- 
vice of the Freedman's Bureau under Gen. Howard, 
was assigned to the Jamestown peninsula, and there, 
in the midst of thousands of Freedmen, childish, 
ignorant, and unskilled, he realized the problem of 
the future, and set himself at once to work out a solu- 
tion. A firm believer in the "Gospel of Labor," a 
strong man on fire with missionary zeal, he conse- 
crated his best energies, physical, intehectual, and 
spiritual to the purpose of realizing the vision which, 
even before entering the service of the Bureau, had 
come to him while sailing on a troop-ship to Texas, 
and twice afterward — the dream of his school as it 
afterward became. In 1868, the institution now known 
as the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute 
was started on land only a few miles from the spot 
where the first cargo of slaves was landed in 1619, 
overlooking the famous battle ground of the Monitor 
and the Merrimac. For two years the school was car- 
ried on under the auspices of the A. M. A. with Gen. 
Armstrong as its principal ; but in 1870, it was char- 
tered by a special act of the General Assembly of Vir- 
ginia, and is now a private corporation controlled by 
a board of seventeen trustees, representing seven relig- 
ious denominations, and almost as many dififerent sec- 
tions of the country. The magnificent record of 38 
years cannot be compressed into the limits of a para- 
graph. In 1868, one teacher, a matron, fifteen pupils ; 
in 1906, 120 officers and teachers, over 1,200 pupils — 



MISSIONS MULTIPLIED m 

400 in the Whittier Practise School — 60 buildings, 
including large dormitories, a Memorial Church, 
library, museum, hospital, gymnasium, printing office ; 
academic, trade, agriculture, and domestic science 
buildings ; shops in which 18 trades are taught, and 

farms containing about 800 acres of land. Of the 

1,310 Negro graduates, 85 per cent have been teachers 
for at least a time ; over 25 per cent are farmers or 
tradesmen ; 5,000 undergraduates have gone out into 
a world needing the valuable assistance of their indus- 
trial training; over 75 per cent of those learning trades 
within the last ten years are either teaching them or 
working at them. Among the unique features of 
Hampton are its Summer Sessions for teachers, pro- 
viding not only for the usual academic studies, but for 
instruction in trades, agriculture, and domestic science, 
and the Annual Negro Conference held in June for the 
discussion of questions vital to the advancement of the 
race, showing in the subjects treated an already mar- 
velous advance. The Committees of the Conference 
suggest the topics : Economic Conditions ; Education, 
Religion and Morals ; Charities and Corrections ; Vital 
and Sanitary Problems ; Civic Relations ; Housing and 
Land Problems. The Southern Workman is pub- 
lished monthly by the Institute ; thousands of Hamp- 
ton Leaflets on practical subjects are printed and dis- 
tributed ; religious influences are always and every- 
where exerted, and the whole wide range of multiplied 
activities is under the efficient management of Dr. H. 
B. Frissell, the worthy successor of him who planted 
the seeds of a Christian industrial education for the 
Negro, which have borne such abundant fruit not only 
in Hampton, but in Tuskegee, and all the great indus- 
trial schools of the South. In 1893, Gen. Armstrong 
entered a realm of higher service above, but his works 



112 LESSON IV 

live after him and his memory is fragrant in the hearts 
of all whom he has helped and inspired, blacks and 
whites alike. A recent issue of The Southern Work- 
man contained this poetic tribute to a great man and 
a good : 

"Born to the music of far tropic seas, 
Where Mauna Loa with her smoky crown, 
O'er verdant sunny isles looks regnant down. 
He took in Nature's school, her high degrees. 
The ocean's sweep in storm or rippling breeze. 
The midnight stars, the dizzy mountain trail. 
Life 'neath the sky, the saddle, and the sail. 
The tumbling surf, the hills, the lofty trees. 
His spirit formed, till lusty manhood came 
Full of high purpose to uplift and bless, 
Strong to endure life's utmost toil and stress. 
In learning's quest he left his island shore. 
Thirsting for truth, careless of pelf or fame, 
Eager to serve; and found the open door. 
Straight from the sheltered charm of college days, 
Stirred by the mighty conflict's high appeal, 
He buckled on his sword with flaming zeal. 
Not, in the strife to win a soldier's bays. 
But up from lowliest lot the oppressed to raise 
To manhood's plane; and when the goal was won, 
Rank and renown, crowned duty nobly done. 
Back from the field returned to peaceful ways. 
Charged with the care of helpless thousands here. 
He ceaseless strove, and toiled and wrought and 

planned, 
To train the darkened mind, the heart, the hand. 
All that we see to-day is his, and him, 
Hero and founder, leader beloved, and seer, 
A beacon light the years can never dim." 



Presbyterian Xo no one body of Christians alone 

Board of Missions was it given to enter the open door 
For Freedmen. of opportunity, when the shackles 

fell from a great host of captive 
slaves ; but the welfare of the Freedman made its 
thrilling appeal to the Christian conscience of all the 
churches. Response was quick and prompt, and en- 



MISSIONS MULTIPLIED 113 

deavor has been persistent and successful; but it is 
possible to mention here only the most important work 
of our great denominational boards. Scarcely had the 
War closed, when the Presbyterians organized in their 
mission work a special Board of Missions for Freed- 
mcn, to educate and evangelize, "to build up Christian 
character and to promote Christian living." With what 
result, a few facts and figures from their 41st Annual 
Report will best indicate, tho figures cannot measure 
influence and indirect results. Over 220 ministers are 
at work, serving 366 churches and missions in the 
Southland, churches numbering over 22,000 members, 
and Sabbath Schools with nearly the same member- 
ship. There are 108 schools under the care of this 
Board ; one a large university, Biddle University at 
Charlotte, N. C; five are boarding schools for girls — 
Scotia Seminary, Concord, N. C, Mary Allen Semin- 
ary, Crockett, Tex., Ingleside Seminary, Burkeville, 
Va., Mary Holmes Seminary, West Point, Miss., and 
Barber Memorial Seminary, Anniston, Ala. Of the 
twelve co-educational boarding schools, two of them — 
Harbison College, Abbeville, S. C, and Haines Nor- 
mal and Industrial School, Angusta, Ga. — bid fair to 
rank, the former with the best industrial schools, and 
the latter with the foremost Normal Institutes in the 
South. The other schools are academic and ''parochial 
schools," and in all there are over 17,000 pupils under 
the guiding care of 332 teachers, training head and 

hand and heart. The parochial or parish school is 

one of the most eflfective agencies of the Board. 
Whenever a church is organized, there, if possible, is 
established a school supervised and often taught by 
the pastor, whose mission is to give not only a good, 
thorough common school education, but definite relig- 
ious instruction, teaching God's word, and how to live 



114 LESSON IV 

a life that will honor him. This is the testimony of 
one South CaroHna pastor: 

"In the section of this state in which a school of 
this grade has been carried on for fourteen years, 
there has not been a single conviction of a Negro 
in the criminal courts, or one case of murder 
since the beginning of the school. The removal of 
the school would be a death blow to the intel- 
lectual, spiritual and moral growth of the people 
of that locality." 

How much the parents appreciate this help is evident 
from the gifts of butter, milk, and eggs sent by those 
too poor to pay the trifling charge of tuition. ''Im- 
agine a poor little Negro boy or girl coming to the 
school with a cup of salt as compensation for the priv- 
ilege of learning lessons held so lightly by our chil- 
dren." Imagine, too, a regular Friday morning 
prayer meeting in one of these schools, when a little 
girl asked God to bless the poor heathen, and help her 
to be one to take the Gospel to them that are in dark- 
ness. Who can estimate the far-reaching results of 
a work that not only makes for knowledge, industry, 
and Christian character, but plants the missionary im- 
pulse even in the hearts of the little ones ? 

Tke Freedmeii»s Aid Given in full, that branch of the 
of M. E. Church. mission work of a great denom- 

ination whose membership in- 
cludes a large proportion of the dark-skinned brothers 
of the South, is called The Freedmen's Aid and South- 
ern Education Society of the Methodist Episcopal 
Church. The name suggests a service not limited to 
the Negroes, but rendered as well to that multitude 
in the Southern States whose need of educational 
assistance is so great. In 1900, the per capita expen- 
diture for public schools in Massachusetts was $4.93, 



MISSIONS MULTIPLIED 115 

with an average of $2.83 in the whole country; but 
in the state of North CaroHna it was but 51 cents, and 
only 50 cents in Alabama. All the mission boards 
recognize and respond to this crying need of help, but 
that work is not included in this brief record of sym- 
pathetic aid rendered to the Freedmen. In 1906, 

this M. E. Society celebrated its 40th Anniversary, 
and from the report presented on that occasion a few 
facts may be gleaned. 

"Forty years ago we had no lands, no buildings, 
and only one teacher. To-day we have 46 institu- 
tions with land and buildings valued at $1,991,569, 
with 645 teachers, and an enrollment of 11,825 stu- 
dents. During the forty years of our work, we 
have had in our schools nearly 300,000 pupils, 
and have sent out over 12,000 teachers and 3,000 
ministers among the colored people, who have 
in turn touched and uplifted many thousands of 
their race. In addition to these teachers, min- 
isters, and professional graduates, hundreds of 
men and women carefully trained in the indus- 
tries have been sent forth to dignify labor and to 
become examples of thrift and industry among 
their people. To-day we have more industrial 
schools, more industrial students, and send out 
every year more industrial graduates than any 
institution or set of institutions in the South." 

Of the principal schools under the control of this 
Board may be mentioned : Gammon Theological Sem- 
inary, South Atlanta, Ga., whose president is one of 
the strongest men his race has produced in America, 
Rev. Dr. J. IV. E. Bowen, for fourteen years Pro- 
fessor of Church History in the Seminary ; Flint Med- 
ical College, Nezv Orleans, La., connected with the 
University in that city; Meharry Medical College, 
Nashville, Tenn. Ten collegiate institutions, and 
eleven academies, placed at important points in eleven 
Southern States are furthering the moral and spiritual 
development of their students, as well as that merely 



116 LE880N IV 

intellectual and industrial. Gracious revivals are of 
frequent occurrence, and the number of individual 
conversions increases with every passing year. Chris- 
tian schools are the hope of the Southland and its 
people, and Christians everywhere should rally to their 
support. Fit and beautiful is the closing suggestion 
from this report of forty years' work for the Freed- 
men: 

"Lincoln Birthday Sunday is now generally ob- 
served thruout the church. It is a growing con- 
viction upon our pastors and people that the birth- 
day of the Great Emancipator is the most appro- 
priate day on which to lay upon the hearts of 
Christian patriots, this great cause for completing 
the work which Lincoln began, and to take 
offerings for its maintenance and support." 

P. E. Church Work In the Domestic Section of the 
Among the Negroes, report of an organization of wide 

reach and influence, known as 
The Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society of the 
Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States, one 
may find answer to the question, **What is this church 
doing for the Christian and industrial training of the 
colored people of the South?" Forty years ago, a 
far-seeing clergyman, Rev. Dr. J. Brenton Smith, 
founded near Raleigh, N. C, a school for colored peo- 
ple, called St. Augustine's. It began in one building, 
and there was given an ordinary school education 
with training in farm work. To-day it is St. Augus- 
tine's Normal and Industrial School, with ten build- 
ii;gs, and 400 students learning useful trades. Con- 
nected with it is St. Agnes's Hospital and Training 
School, where young colored women are trained as 
nurses, who find ready employment in the homes of 
the white people in the vicinity, and are a constant 
source of blessing to the sick poor of the neighbor- 



MISSIONS MULTIPLIED 117 

hood. At Lawrenceville, Va., is St. Paul's Normal 
and Industrial School, and these two institutions are 
rapidly measuring up to the standard of Hampton and 
Tuskegee, teaching Negro youth "how to do things." 
Similar work is being done at St. Athanasius's Pa- 
rochial Normal and Industrial School, Brunswick, Ga., 
and at St. Mark's Academy and Industrial School, 
Birmingham, Ala.; and there are ninety parochial and 
industrial schools besides. Definite religious teaching 
is given here, as well as all along the line of Kinder- 
gartens, Sabbath Schools, and church services main- 
tained by the faithful missionary workers of the 
church. Provision has been made, also, for the higher 
theological education of those Negroes wishing to take 
Holy Orders, at the Bishop Payne Divinity School, 
Petersburg, Va., and at King Theological Hall, Wash- 
ington, D. C, opened in 1905, "to train for the Negro 
race clergy and missionaries such as carried the light 
of the gospel to the barbarous ancestors of what are 
now the most progressive nations of the earth/' Very 
recently, the Board of Missions of this church has 
created The American Institute for Negroes, incor- 
porated under the laws of the State of Virginia, to 
give greater efficiency to their educational work, there- 
by contributing to the more rapid advancement and 
regeneration of the race. 

Colored Men's When the First Young Men's Chris- 
Departmeut tian Associations were organized in this 
of Y. M. C. A. country — at Boston and Montreal, in 

185 1 — there seemed little prospect of 
that measure of freedom and intelligence which would 
make possible work among the colored men of the 
land. Slaves could not be organized into such asso- 
ciations, but educated freemen could; and when the 



118 LE880N IV 

International Convention met in Richmond, in 1875, 
a petition was presented by the pastors of the colored 
churches of that city, praying that the way might open 
for the extension of association work among the young 
men of their race in the South. The following year, 
the presiding officer of the convention held in Toronto, 
himself from Alabama, urged the importance of this 
work; and the first contribution toward the fund for 
the support of an International Secretary in this new 
field came from an eminent clergyman of Louisville, 
Ky. In 1879, such a secretary was secured from Ober- 
lin, Ohio, a man who gave eleven years of self-sacri- 
ficing labor to the development of this work chiefly in 
the schools and colleges at the South. To-day there 
are three Negro secretaries supervising the work 
among the 2,000,000 colored men in North America. 
Mr. IV. A. Hunton attends to the general interests of 
both departments, with one secretary devoting all his 
time to the city associations, and another to the 
schools. There are 36 city associations, tho only 2i 
paid local secretaries, doing efficient work in their 
physical, social, intellectual, and religious departments ; 
their Bible classes show an attendance of nearly 5,000. 

and the religious meetings of 53,370. The first 

new building to be erected by a Colored Association 
was dedicated July i, 1900, at Norfolk, Va., and now 
16 buildings have been built, or adapted to association 
purposes, and the success of such work is assured. 

In the schools and colleges of the South, there 

are 82 associations, and the presidents of these institu- 
tions bear valuable testimony to the service rendered 
by them in their midst — service essentially Christian 
and missionary. One writes : 

"The record shows that out of 227 students, all 
but 12 are professing Christians. This condition 



MISSIONS MULTIPLIED nj 

is due largely to the Y. M. C. A. as an instrument 
in the Master's hands." 

Another says, "Our largest revivals had their begin- 
ning in the Y. M. C. A. Sunday meetings." And the 
pastor of a colored church in New York city pays this 
deserved tribute : 

"Our race should feel proud of the intelligent, 
consecrated International Secretaries. No preach- 
er in our race of any denomination is doing more 
to solve the vexed and intricate Negro problem 
than is being done by these men in organizing 
our young men for the highest Christian citizen- 
ship." 



BAPTIST EFFORT AND ACHIEVEMEIVT 

Southern ]n those troubled days when the question 
Baptist of domestic slavery entered so critically 

ConTention. into all the great affairs of the nation, it 
was not politics alone, but even the 
churches and religious societies which felt the shock 
that split in twain bodies harmonious and entire till 
then. Of the great denominations so rent asunder, one 
was the Baptist, a body of Christians large and rapid- 
ly increasing both North and South. Believing that 
better and more effective missionary work, both at 
home and abroad, could be accomplished by separate 
organizations, the Southern Baptists withdrew from 
the Baptist General Convention, in which all had 
worked together since its formation in 1845, ^nd 
formed a new society called the Southern Baptist Con- 
vention. The year following, the Northern Baptists 
reorganized under the name of the Baptist Missionary 
Union, which carries on to-day the great and growing 
foreign mission work of the denomination. The 
Southern Baptist Convention also sustains large mis- 



120 LESSON IV 

sions in foreign lands, and has besides work in all parts 
of the Homeland, carried on by its Home Mission 

Board. The loving concern felt by this Board for 

the Negro Neighbors in their midst finds expression 
in the first annual report submitted in 1846. 

"Altho vast numbers of them enjoy religious 
advantages far superior to multitudes of our 
poor white citizens, yet greater numbers are in 
condition to require the special attention of this 
body. The time is not far distant when a wise and 
prudent plan for the religious improvement of 
that class of our population will be generally 
approved and adopted." 

Three years later, the report referred to the 130,000 
Negroes then belonging to Baptist churches, and 
recommended that the missionaries devote as much as 
possible of their time and service to the spiritual v^el- 
fare of the colored people, stating that two had been 
appointed especially to them. In 185 1, the Board 
could report that this department of their labor was 
increasino- in interest everv vear ; that their mission- 
aries were holding special services for the benefit of 
the slaz'cs, and all bearing favorable testimony to the 
happy influence of the Gospel upon the hearts and lives 
of those people. So runs the record until the War; 
then there was other work for heart and hand ; but 
no sooner was peace declared than the work of the 
Prince of Peace was resumed. Every passing year 
showed increased interest on the part of the churches, 
and increased eagerness for the Gospel on the part of 
the Freedmen. By 1868, thirty churches had been 
organized, and twenty-four meeting houses com- 
menced ; in 1882, one missionary was appointed special 
instructor in theology, and more than 100 deacons and 
preachers profited by his lectures ; in 1886, as a result, 
perhaps, there were more than twenty colored preach- 



MISSIONS MULTIPLIED 121 

crs enrolled among the missionaries of the Board. A 
constantly growing sense of obligation to a race that 
has so long lived in their midst and served them in 
material things, has prompted the Southern Baptist 
Convention to devise new plans, in co-operation with 
another body, for discharging this obligation in the 
power and love of Christ, by serving them more faith- 
fully in spiritual things. 

National The very large number of Negro Baptists 
Baptist ill the United States, most of whom are 
Conieutioiu in the South, have organized themselves 
into a body called the National Baptist 
Convention, meeting once a year, and consisting of 
delegates from the Negro Churches, Sunday Schools, 
Missionary Societies, District and General Associa- 
tions, Sunday School and State Conventions. This 
Convention has its Mission Boards, its schools and 
colleges, and its co-operative work with the State 
Boards in ten Southern States, Indian Territory and 
Oklahoma. Thirty-five High Schools and colleges, 
besides many lower schools, are under the direct con- 
trol of Negro boards and faculties, tho only par- 
tially supported by them ; and in these schools are 
enrolled nearly three-fourths of all the Baptist schol- 
ars in Baptist schools. Some of the leading institu- 
tions so managed are : Virginia Seminary and College, 
Lynchburg, Va.; Central City College, Macon, Ga.; 
Alabama University, Selma, Ala.; Florida Baptist Col- 
lege, Jacksonville, Fla.; Central College, Macon, Mo.; 
Arkansas Baptist College, Little Rock, Ark.; Guada- 
lupe College, Scguin, Tex.; State University, Louis- 
ville, Ky.; and Eckstein Norton University, Cane 
Springs, Ky. What a record for a people not yet two 
generations out of bondage! To such a repre- 



122 LESSON IV 

scntative Negro organization as this, the Home Mis- 
sion Board of the Southern Baptist Convention pre- 
sented in 1904 a plan of co-operation for the further 
rehgious development of the Negroes, to lift them up 
to nobler ideals and higher standards of living. The 
plan was accepted, and according to its terms, the 
National Baptist Convention selects the missionaries 
— of the colored race — agreeing upon their salaries 
and fields of labor. The other Board shares in the 
responsibility and expense, and the report of 1906 
showed thirty-three missionaries so maintained, and 
a work to their credit of incalculable benefit not only 
to the people whose need is so great, but to the spirit 
of brotherly love and harmony which is bringing the 
Gospel of Christ to bear in fuller measure upon the 
problem of the races. 

American When the A. B. H. M. S. was organ- 

Baptist ized in 1832 "to promote the preaching 

Home Mission of the Gospel in North America," its 
Society. principal field of labor was the Mis- 

sissippi Valley. In twenty years, the 
westward course of empire had extended its oppor- 
tunity for service to the Golden Gate. In thirty 
years, the fall of broken fetters gave entrance to the 
Sunny Southland, and straightway it entered in, to 
share in the growing work of winning the Freedmen 
to the hope and knowledge of the Gospel with all its 
blessings for the life that now is, and that which is to 
come. Very simple w^as the entrance effort — just to 
teach the poor ministers who could not read their 
Bibles ; then those others who were so eager to learn ; 
then the schools developed into large and flourishing 
institutions, and the educational service of the 
Society was assured. It has been a definitely Chris- 



MISSIONS MULTIPLIED 128 

tian education given in all these schools, with the 
Bible for a text-book, Bible Schools and prayer- 
meetings, missionary and temperance societies for 
added means ; and soul culture and upright conduct 
for an end. How great has been the measure of suc- 
cess, no figures can fully tell, but from the latest an- 
nual report are gleaned the facts w^hich need the touch 
of a spiritual imagination to make them glow with 

life and beauty. Colored missionaries have been 

employed in 19 states and territories ; among the col- 
ored people, 46 missionaries and 260 teachers have 
given loyal, earnest service ; about 30 schools and col- 
leges have been supported wholly or in part by the 
Society ; conversions have been numerous ; homes 
have been transformed ; industrial education has been 
advanced ; teachers and preachers have been trained ; 
and a missionary spirit has been cultivated which 
promises much for the regeneration of Africa, as well 
as the enlightenment of the dark corners of the Home- 
land. Omitting the schools supported in part by the 
National Baptist Convention and the Woman's 
Societies, the following are some of the most import- 
ant institutions under the fostering care of the Amer- 
ican Baptist Home Mission Society: Atlanta Baptist 
College, Atlanta, Ga. — founded in 1867 at Augusta, 
but later transferred to Atlanta — Rev. John Hope, 
President; Benedict College, Columbia, S. C. — found- 
ed in 1870 and named for Mrs. Stephen Benedict of 
Pawtucket, R. I., whose generosity made it possible — 
Rev. A. C. Oshorn, D. D., President; Bishop College, 
Marshall, T^-^r.— founded in i^i—Rev. A. B. 
Chaffee, D. D., President; Shaw University, Raleigh, 
TV; C.— with Law and Medical Schools, founded in 
1865 and named for its generous donor — Rev. C. F. 
Meserve, LL. D., President; Virginia Union Univer- 



124 LESSON IV 

sity — a consolidation of Wayland Seminary founded 
at Washington, D. C, in 1865, and Richmond Theo- 
logical Seminary — Rev. G. R. Hovey, D. D., Presi- 
dent; Florida Institute — founded at Live Oak, Fla., 
in 1876; Roger Williams University, Nashville, 
Tenn.; Hearne Academy, Hearne, Tex.; Houston 
Academy, Houston, Tex.; Howe Bible and Normal 
Institute, Memphis, Tenn.; leniel Academy, Athens, 
Ga.; Walker Institute, Augusta, Ga.; and Western 

College, Macon, Mo. Over 500 students for the 

ministry are annually enrolled in these schools ; in 
view of this fact, and the constantly improving public 
schools of the South, the Society now faces the im- 
portant question, whether its future efforts may not 
wisely be centered on such work as will serve to give 
a better qualified ministry to the 15,000 Negro Baptist 
Churches, in which are enrolled over two-fifths of the 
more than 5,000,000 Baptists in the United States. *To 
promote the preaching of the Gospel in North Amer- 
ica," is still the highest aim of the A. B. H. M. S. 
in 1907, as in 1832. 

Womeu's Baptist The women who publish the tidings 
Home Mission are a great host, whether working 

Society. independently in so magnificent an 

organization as the Woman's Home 
^lissionary Society of the M. E. Church, or as aux- 
iliary societies in most of the other denominations. 
Both co-operation and freedom characterize the ef- 
forts of our Baptist women. The Women's Baptist 
Home Mission Society, organized in Chicago, Feb. i, 
1877, has for its distinctive work "the Christianiza- 
tion and elevation of the homes of the people," and 
most of this work is done independently, but part in 
connected with the A. B. H. M. S. Three months 




A Cahis Ho. mi: 



MISSIONS MULTIPLIED 125 

after organization, the first appointment was con- 
ferred upon Miss Joanna P. Moore, who had already 
given years of consecrated service to Negro women 
and children. Tlie character of her work can be 
judged, in a measure, by her first year's report: 5,000 
visits, 300 Bible readings and teachers' meetings, 4 
sewing schools each week, and personal religious 
conversation with almost every one she met. What 
is the result of her forty-four years' labor, only the 
recording angel knows ! And this pioneer in the field 
and veteran in service is still doing the work her Mas- 
ter so long ago committed to her charge. In 1888, 
she opened at Baton Rouge a Training School for 
Christian workers, wives and mothers, but the wrath 
of wicked men drove her from the state. In Novem- 
ber, 1890. a notice signed by "The White League," 
and decorated with skull and cross-bones was posted 
on Miss Moore's gate ; the implied threat was not 
difficult to understand, and when dastardly outrages 
were committed on respectable colored men, and the 
women pupils fled in terror to their homes, her work 
in Louisiana was ended. But, until this year. Miss 
Moore, with three secretaries and five hundred volun- 
tary assistants in all parts of the South, has directed 
in Nashville a movement unique in its method, but 
wonderfully far-reaching and effective. This is the 
Fireside School, which provides for a regular course 
of reading in the homes, including a portion of the 
Scriptures. The parents enrolled promise to read each 
day with their children, and sign besides the following 
pledge : 

"I. I promise that by the help of God I will 
pray with and for my children, and expect 
their early conversion. 

II. I will try to be a good pattern for my chil- 
dren in my daily life, especially in temper, 
conversation and dress. 



126 LESSON IT 

III. I will recognize the fact that God expects 
me to care for and train my children for 
Him in soul and mind as well as body." 

Thousands of books are sold and given away, a paper 
— Hope — edited by Miss Moore as the organ of the 
Fireside School, has a monthly circulation of 8,000, 
carrying to many homes a Bible lesson for every day 
in the month with a practical exposition fitting it to 
the conduct of everyday life. Probably no white per- 
son, man or woman, has entered into so many colored 
homes as has Miss Moore ; and the story of her long 
life with its many and varied labors is one of thrilling 
and inspiring interest. Only recently has she con- 
sented to share with the public some of her wonderful 
experiences, and the series of autobiographical 
sketches published under the name In Christ's Stead 

deserves wide and appreciative reading. Many 

of her methods are followed by other devoted mis- 
sionaries of this Women's Society, of whom 213 have 
been employed in the 29 years from 1877 to 1906. Of 
these, 126 were white and 87 colored women; and the 
record of the last year's work shows that of the 57 then 
employed, 24 were white and 33 colored. The Train- 
ing Schools of the Society have rendered invaluable 
service in the preparation of consecrated, cultivated 
workers in homes and schools. The Baptist Mission- 
ary Training School in Chicago has trained hundreds 
of white girls for all lines of Christian effort, both at 
home and on the foreign field. In 1902, a special train- 
ing school was opened by this Society in connection 
with Shaw University, Raleigh, for colored women 
who might wish to prepare for work among their own 
people in the Southern States, in Africa, or some other 
distant land. About two years later, the Caroline 
Bishop Training School was started at Marshall, Tex., 




Miss Harriet E. Giles 



Miss Sophia B. Packard 



FOUNOEKS OF Si'EI.MAX SeMINARY 



MISSIONS MULTIPLIED 127 

as a department of Bishop College^ but was trans- 
ferred in 1898 to Dallas, Texas. In 1905, as the 
buildings at Shaw were needed for a hospital con- 
nected with the Medical School, that training depart- 
ment was consolidated with the one at Dallas, where 
now are in training the Negro girls and women who 
are to wield so great an influence in the generation to 

come. Co-operating with the W. B. H. M. S. in 

several branches of its work is the IVomans Baptist 
Home Mission Society of Michigan^ an independent 
state organization started earlier than either the 
society in the West or our own in the East. Formed 
in 1873, its work has reached seventeen states and 
seven distinct nationalities, but its special service to 
the Negroes has been rendered by contributing to the 
support of a teacher in Hartshorn, and the missionaries 
of the Western Society. Its watchword has the ring 
of earnestness and efficiencv — "What thou doest, do 
quickly." 

OUR SCHOOLS AND TEACHERS 

"As much the more one says Ours, 

So much the more of good each one possesses." 

Spelman Very dear to the hearts of the New Eng- 
Seminary. land women who constitute the member- 
ship of the Woman's American Baptist 
Home ^Hssion Society is this now famous institution 
for colored girls — "The Vassar of the South.'* When 
the W. A. B. H. M. S. was organized in November, 
1877, eight months later than its sister society in the 
West, its object was *'the evangelization of the women 
among the freed-people, the Indians, the heathen im- 
migrants, and the new settlements of the West.'' The 
first money — $50.00 — was sent to aid Mrs. Harriet 



128 LESSON 17 

Newell Hart in her work among the colored people of 
a little village in Georgia. Was that a foreshadowing 
of the institution — the greatest of our schools — to be 
later planted in the very heart of Georgia? From 
the outset, the efforts of the Society were directed 
chiefly to the appointment and support of teachers, 
and in the division of territory and service made in 
1880, the work of Christian education became our 
definite mission. The story of the founding of Spel- 
man reads like a chapter from the Modern Acts of 
the Apostles. Two noble Christian women, Miss 
Sophia B. Packard — the first Corresponding Secretary 
of the Society — and Miss Harriet E. Giles, were ap- 
pointed in the spring of 1881 to go to Atlanta "to en- 
gage in whatever educational work their judgment 
should dictate." In their hearts they had already 
heard the pitiful cry of ignorance rising from the 
young womanhood of a destitute people, and they 
went gladly, not counting home, nor comfort, nor 
reputation dear unto themselves. They reached At- 
lanta April I, and went the following morning to the 
study of Rev. Frank Quarles, pastor of the Friend- 
ship Baptist Church. So strong was this good man's 
desire for the elevation of his race, that they found 
him on his knees pleading for Christian teachers for 
the women and the girls. What wonder that rising 
to respond to the strangers' knock, he greeted them 
with the words, ''God has sent you!" By his help pro- 
vision was made for starting a school, and the first 
session was held April 11, in the dark, damp basement 
of the Friendship Church. Steady growth in num- 
bers and in needs followed, and in 1883, such generous 
gifts were received from John D. Rockefeller, that the 
name was changed from Atlanta Baptist Female Sem- 
inary to Spelman Seminary in honor of Mrs. Rocke- 



MISSIONS MULTIPLIED 129 

feller's parents, life-long friends of the Negro. 



In 1906, its 25th anniversary was observed, and the 
marvelous work of a quarter century fitly and grate- 
fully celebrated. Material prosperity finds its evidence 
in the change from the dark, damp basement to the 
ten fine brick buildings on a twenty-acre campus, and 
the names of the principal buildings are enduring 
tributes to some of those generous souls whose work 
or gifts have made them possible. Packard Hall and 
Giles Hall, honoring past and present principals, con- 
tain recitation rooms, dormitories, library and print- 
ing office. Rockefeller Hall contains offices, class 
rooms and Howe Memorial chapel. MacVicar Hos- 
pital bears the name of one of Spelman's life-long 
friends and helpers — Rev. Malcolm MacVicar, D. D., 
LL. D., for fourteen fruitful years in the service of the 
A. B. H. M. S. as its Superintendent of Education — 
a man with faith in the Negro and his future. Mor- 
gan Hall keeps green the memory of Gen. Thomas J. 
Morgan, for nine years the chief executive officer of 
the A. B. H. M. S., who gave to all departments of 
its work the skill and efficiency of cultured brain and 
sympathetic heart, but to whom the cause of the col- 
ored people made special and compelling appeal. As 
a patriot, he served his country in the Civil War, or- 
ganizing and commanding the First Colored Brigade 
of the Army of the Cumberland ; as a philanthropist, 
he served the Freedmen, organizing and directing for 
their highest good. Morehouse Hall is named for the 
present efficient Corresponding Secretary of the A. B, 
H. M. S., and Reynolds Cottage — the President's resi- 
dence — for the honored Secretary of the IV. A. B. H, 

M. S. Over 6,000 colored girls and women 

have had help and blessing within these walls, 665 in 
last year's enrollment. Into all forms of Christian life 



130 LESSON IV 

and service have they entered ; even girls from the 
Congo have been trained to go back and carry the 
good tidings to their kin in the heart of Africa. 
Forty-six teachers are engaged in the noble v^ork of 
instruction and seventeen of these are supported by 
our society. The motto of Spelman is, Our Whole 
School for Christ," and so fully has it been realized 
in the lives and labor of the great host of Spelman 
women that one may almost dare to write it — 

"The world for Christ we sing. 
The world to Christ we bring." 



Mather "Whenever it is written, and I hope it will 
School, be — the part that the Yankee teachers played 
in the education of the Negroes immediately 
after the war, will make one of the most thrill- 
ing parts of the history of this country. The 
time is not far distant when the whole South 
will appreciate this service in a way that it has 
not yet been able to do." 

— [Booker T. Washington. 

One of those Yankee teachers was Mrs. Rachel C. 
Mather of Boston, who had so strong and deep a de- 
sire to teach the Freedmen that in 1867 she offered 
her services to the A. M. A. and was sent to conduct 
a Normal School at Beaufort, S. C. Finding too few 
pupils for such advanced work, but many destitute 
children, she opened at her own expense an orphanage, 
and then organized a school near by. Crowds came, 
until accommodations were outgrown ; those who 
came on Sundays for the Sunday School must be re- 
fused as day scholars, and even then the sessions 
must be held out in the open air. For lack of supplies, 
the New Testament was the only reading book, and 
Yankee ingenuity provided instruction in Arithmetic, 
Geography, and Grammar from the teacher's own 



MISSIONS MULTIPLIED 131 

well-furnished mind, until a gift of second-hand 
school books was received from the Boston School 
Committee. The work grew in spite of strife and 
struggle; girls were received for domestic training; a 
temperance society was organized, and every possible 
means employed to overcome indolence and idleness, 
poverty and drunkenness in the homes from which 
ihc children came. Supported for a time by the gifts 
of Mrs. Mather's friends, the school at last founa in 
the IV. A. B. H. M. S. a friend and helper ; and in 
]88i, the property at Beaufort was deeded to the 
Society, which has since cared for the institution. In 
1^93. hoXh school and people suffered intensely from 
the fearful storm which laid waste the cotton fields of 
the Sea Islands, and caused such destitution and loss 
of life. The Mission was turned into a relief station. 
Hundreds of barrels of clothing were sent from the 
North. Sometimes over tzvo hundred needv ones 
were helped in a single day, and the starving, home- 
less poor thanked God for Mrs. Mather's ministry of 
love. In iS9<;. after long years of service, she asked 
to be relieved of the school work, tho she kept her 
home for the industrial training of her group of girls, 
and her loving interest in all the work of the school 

continued until she passed to her reward. Since 

then. Miss S. E. Owen, formerly one of the Society's 
teachers at Allendale, N. C, has been in charge of the 
school, which covers the grades from the Primary to 
the Grammar. It numbers at present between sixty 
and seventy boarding students, and nearly as many day 
pupils who pay five cents a week for tuition, and when 
there is no money bring wood, oysters, sweet potatoes, 
pecan nuts, or anything the home can provide. Four 
dormitories, Owen Hall, and the Sale-House are the 
principal buildings, and longing girls are continually 



132 LESSON IV 

being turned away because of lack of room. Without 
the assets of the Sale-House^ filled with the contents 
of the boxes and barrels sent by the home circles at 
the North, and emptied by eager purchasers among 
the pupils and their parents, even more must be re- 
jected. As the teachers — all nine of them say: 

"They mean to us barrels of flour, sacks of meal, 
gallons of oil, cords of wood, assistant matron's 
salary, and great peace of mind.'' ^ 

Hartshorn In the early summer of 1883, some teach- 
Memorial ers from the South were guests in the 
College. beautiful home of Deacon Joseph C. 
Hartshorn of Providence, R. I. The host, 
deeply touched by the need of greater educational ad- 
vantages for colored girls as then presented, and 
mindful of the great interest shown by his wife in 
their welfare, gave in her memory $10,000 as the 
nucleus of a fund for a school for their higher educa- 
tion. Mrs. Hartshorn had been a beloved member of 
the Board of the W. A. B. H. M. S., and it was es- 
pecially fitting that a memorial to her should advance 
the work so dear to all their hearts. An estate was 
purchased in Richmond, Va.; the principal and teach- 
ers found their home in the Mansion House — the 
residence of an old time slave holder; the vestry of 
the Ebenezer Church half a mile distant was hired for 
a school room, and in November the first session was 
held with thirty-one pupils in attendance. Another 
$10,000 gift from Deacon Hartshorn, the following 
spring, provided for the erection of the large and con- 
venient house which is the principal college building* 
and in the same year, the institution was granted a 
charter by the Legislature of Virginia, with full col- 
legiate and university powers. This beautiful inscrip- 



MISSIONS MULTIPLIED 133 

tion engraven in letters of bronze shows the spirit and 
purpose of the founder as no other words could do. 

Inscription 



For the love of Christ, who gave himself for 
the redemption alike of every race; and 

For the love of country, whose welfare de- 
pends upon the intelligence, virtue and piety of 
the lowly as well as of the great; and 

With tender sympathy for a people for whom 
till late no door of hope has been open and aspira- 
tion has been vain; and 

With desire and hope for the enlightenment of 
the Dark Continent, the Fatherland of the colored 
race. 

In memory of his sainted wife, 

RACHEL HARTSHORN, 

that her faith and charity might be reproduced 
and perpetuated in the lives of many, this institu- 
tion was founded by 

JOSEPH C. HARTSHORN, 
of Rhode Island. 

On such a foundation, what wonder that the record of 
twenty-three years is one of strong, successful effort to 
raise up a body of thoroughly educated Christian 
women as consecrated workers in the harvest field of 
the world. In the Annual Catalogue for 1906, one 
finds a faculty of twelve members, of which Rev. L. 
B. Tefft, D. D. is President, and four of these teachers 
are supported by our Society, and one by the Mich- 
igan Society. Nearly 170 young women were enrolled 
in the various departments — Preparatory, Normal, 
and Collegiate ; and a simple list of the societies con- 
nected with the college indicates the varied nature of 
the intellectual, moral, and missionary development 
of the students, and their practical preparation for 



134 LES80N IT 

their future usefulness : The Rachel Hartshorn Edu- 
cation and Missionary Society; College Temperance 
Society; Hartshorn Home Workers — for house-to- 
house mission work in the city ; Pierian Literary So- 
ciety; The Alumnae Association, and The White 
Shield League — the largest in the world. What a 
force for righteousness in home and foreign lands 
streams forth from Hartshorn Memorial College! 



Waters In the black belt of North Carolina, about 
Normal one hundred and fifty miles from Raleigh, 
Institute, is situated Waters Normal Institute, found- 
ed in 1886 by its present principal, Rev. C. 
S. Brozvn, D. D. The colored population of that re- 
gion greatly outnumbers that of the whites, and they 
had long been eager and anxious for school privileges ; 
but they had no leader until Mr. Brown came to them 
after his graduation from Shaw University. Faith, 
courage, and hard work, with a little help from sym- 
pathizing friends, brought to him — and them — such a 
measure of success that the school, then called Win- 
ton Academy and later Chowan Academy, was opened 
in October, 1886, with an attendance far in excess of 
the accommodations. To procure larger quarters, the 
devoted principal visited the North and appealed for 
aid. Wlien Horace Waters of New York responded 
with large gifts and sympathy, the name was changed, 
out of gratitude to him, to Waters Normal Institute. 
New buildings were added as fast as funds could be 
procured, and the school rose rapidly in favor with 
both blacks and whites. In 1892, the W. A. B. H. M. 
S. was asked to support a teacher at Winton, and due 
appreciation of the assistance at once rendered, was 
shown by the name given the next year to a new 



MISSIONS MULTIPLIED 135 

$6,000 building for a girl's dormitory — Reynolds 
Hall. After twenty years of labor, the latest report 
shows an enrollment of nearly 230 pupils, about half 
of whom are boarders. Four of the seven teachers 
are supported by our Society ; and the efficient prin- 
cipal not only superintends all departments, but 
teaches the Sciences, Latin, and Theology — since spec- 
ial provision is made for that large class of colored 
ministers, who desire to improve their preparation — 
is preacher and pastor besides. From him comes this 
testimony and touching appeal : 

"The work given to us is great, to uplift the peo- 
ple and impress Christ upon them. We are rising 
in spite of the enormous pressure to keep us 
down; and if a fair and honest opportunity was 
accorded my people, such as the white people 
themselves enjoy, our upward movement would 
be greatly accelerated. Millions with black faces, 
heartsore but hopeful, still plead for your sym- 
pathy and help." • 

Jackson In 1877, the A. B. H. M. S. founded in 
College. Natchez, Miss., a college which was re- 
moved in 1884 to Jackson where, for over 
twentv years, it has been furnishing intellectual and 
religious training for young men and women earn- 
estly desiring such assistance. In 1894, Rev. L. G. 
Barrett became the principal, and it is Mrs. Barrett — 
the Lady Principal — who is supported by the W. A. 
B. H. M. S. Barrett Hall for the girls, and Ayer Hall 
for the boys are the principal buildings on the cam- 
pus, besides the President's house, a fine brick laun- 
dry, and the farmer's house and large barn for the 
agricultural department. The 29th Annual catalogue 
shows a faculty of 14 white teachers, and an enroll- 
ment of 372 pupils in such courses of instruction as the 
following: Primary and Practise School Course; 



136 LES80N IV 

Grammar or Preparatory Course, Academic and Col- 
lege Preparatory; College and Theological, with a 
special Ministers' Course for those preachers in active 
pastoral service, yet deficient in their early prepara- 
tion. Courses in cooking, sewing, and physical cul- 
ture are provided for the girls, and daily Biblical 
instruction is given to all, with special services on 
Sunday. There are Debating Societies for both young 
men and women ; a F. M. C. A., a College Temperance 
League, a McKinney Missionary Society, are all 
efficient agencies in preparing these young people for 
a life of Christian service, when they go out from the 
sheltering walls of a Christian school. Crowded 
quarters, and constant appeals for help are the signs 
of a success which should be the promise of renewed 
interest, sympathy, and assistance for these Christian 
institutions in the Southland, so dependent for their 
support upon Northern friends and contributions. 

Americas One of the best of our secondary schools is 
InsUtnte. Aniericus Institute, situated in the south- 
western part of Georgia, almost in the cen- 
ter of the black belt and within easy reach of the 
800,000 Negroes living wnthin a radius of a hundred 
miles. As early as 1878, the Southzvestern Georgia 
Baptist Association adopted resolutions to establish a 
school for colored ministers ; and the people, full of 
zeal and enthusiasm, raised money enough to purchase 
a campus in Americus. Then a great disaster befell 
them, and it was years before it was possible even to 
build a two-roomed cottage. So, under changed con- 
ditions and modified plans, the Institute was opened 
in 1897 with principal, assistant, and nine pupils — its 
chief hope of success based upon the great need of 
work in that community. Now the nine pupils have 



MISSIONS MULTIPLIED 137 

become i68, sixty-six of them girls boarding on the 
campus and enjoying the opportunities for instruc- 
tion in cooking, basketry, sewing, and house-keeping 
in general. The boys, who are compelled as yet to 
board in private families, are learning trades and use- 
ful occupations. Besides the Academic Course, there 
is here also a Ministerial Department furnishing much 
needed instruction in the Bible, the arts of hymn- 
reading and sermon-making, and the essential doc- 
trines of Christianity. The principal, M. W. Reddick, 
is a graduate of Atlanta Baptist College; several of 
the teachers are graduates of Spelman. There are two 
circles of King's Daughters; two circles of young men 
whose object is suggested by their names — The Loyal 
Sons of Chivalry, and The Royal Conquerors; 3. C. E. 
Society and a Mission Band. Little wonder that the 
latest report says, "The spiritual condition of the 
school is excellent." Altho this Institute is owned and 
managed by the Georgia Association, assistance is 
given it by the A. B. H. M. S., and our Woman's 
Society has the privilege of supporting two of its 
earnest Christian teachers, thus shedding some gleams 
of light thru the darkness of the black belt. 

Coleman The story of the origin and growth of this 
Academy, successful school for colored youth in the 
extreme South is best told, in part at least, 
in the words of its earnest, enthusiastic founder, a 
graduate of Leland University, Professor 0. L. Cole- 



man:- 



"In 1887, I reached Gibsland, La., finding a sec- 
tion 200 miles wide, and about 300 long, in which 
there was no high school for the colored people; 
but three colored teachers who could pass an in- 
telligent examination, and but three preachers 
who had gone to any kind of a school, and these 



138 LESSON IV 

only for a few months and mostly at night. I 
asked the Lord to help me establish an institution 
in which Christian teachers and preachers might 
be prepared. 1 had no money. I opened a school 
in an old church with ten pupils, meanwhile com- 
menced a two-story building in which I closed the 
session commenced in the church. The first five 
years I gave all my time, thought, prayers, and 
money to the work, my wife doing the same; 
we knew nothing of a salary, and lived on what we 
could collect; all above our actual necessities 
was used for the school. One year I had at the 
close of school $1.50, and another year I had $2.50. 
****** The growth during five years made it 
impossible for the same teachers to do the work. 
I was then teaching sixteen classes a day and was 
worked down. There was no money with which to 
employ others. I asked the Lord to send me help 
or make me willing to give the work up. I prayed 
three times a day under a certain hickory tree for 
four months. The last of September I was in- 
formed that the A. B H M 8. would help pay the 
salaries of the men teachers; and the year follow- 
ing the W. A. B. H. M. S of Boston commenced to 
pay the salaries of the lady teachers. Ever since 
we have been greatly helped by those two So- 
cieties in this way. In fact, they saved the insti- 
tution. God bless them!" 

To-day, Coleman Academy owns 162 acres of land, 
occupies ten buildings, has a faculty of at least twelve 
teachers, four of whom we support, an attendance so 
rapidly increasing that it will soon reach 400, and a 
course of study so satisfactory that the Superintend- 
ent of Education for the State of Louisiana recently 
advised that any money sent to the state for Negro 
education be given to Gibsland ; and the editor of The 
Gibsland Nezvs commends Prof. Coleman's work in 
this most cordial fashion : ''There is perhaps not a 
better school for colored students anywhere. The 
school and its principal have the hearty endorsement 
of leading and thoughtful citizens." Who would not 
help to "save" and to increase such institutions that 



MISSIONS MULTIPLIED 139 

give Christian education and training to the black folk 
of the South? 

Arkansas In 1884, the Negro Baptists of Arkansas, 
Baptist aided by a representative of the A. B. H. 
College. M. S., established at Little Rock the 
Arkansas Baptist College. Its immediate purpose was 
to give the colored preachers of the state the kind of 
training necessary to fit them for their work under 
such conditions as then prevailed. Literary and in- 
dustrial departments w^ere soon added; and the insti- 
tution has grown to proportions worthy of its aims, 
and limited only by its needs. For twenty years it 
has been under the efficient management of President 
Joseph A. Booker, who, with his wife, is a graduate of 
Roger Williams University. Nearly all the twelve 
teachers composing the faculty are graduates of Spel- 
man, Shaw, Tuskegee, or some of the older Home 
Mission schools ; three of them are supported by the 
A. B. H. M. S., and one by our Society. Between 
300 and 400 pupils are being yearly instructed in 
branches from a Grammar School grade to those of a 
moderate College course, most of them coming from 
the State of Arkansas, and many from homes of thrift 
and prosperity. When the college was first started, 
it occupied land a mile beyond the city limits ; now the 
conditions are reversed, and all the available land in 
the vicinity is used for business purposes or for homes. 
Of these homes, 50 per cent are occupied by Negroes, 
and it is estimated that 75 per cent of the graduates — 
or their parents — are property owners in the town or 
farming districts. As President Booker says, ''Much 
of this is due to the doctrine of home-getting, which 
our school preaches to its students." To meet in- 
creasing needs, as increasing opportunities present 



140 LESSON IV 

themselves, is always the problem of the Mission 
Schools, and the appeal on the College letter-heads 
is pertinent and practical : 

"You CAN GIVE MONEY OR MATERIAL IN LARGE 
OR SMALL AMOUNTS. GiVE VV^HILE YOU LIVE."" 



Florida During President Roosevelt's Southern 
Baptist tour in the fall of 1905, he visited the 
Academy. Florida Baptist Academy located at Jack- 
sonville, and from its improvised platform 
addressed an enthusiastic audience of 10,000 people. 
Words of commendation for the work of the school 
were spoken, and the great truth underlying the tre- 
mendous educational need was expressed in this sig- 
nificant phrase — "The costliest crop in any community 
is the crop of ignorance." To eradicate this noxious 
growth from a field less cultivated than almost any 
other in the Union, is the earnest purpose of Principal 
Nathan W. Collier, and his corps of seventeen teach- 
ers and instructors. Florida has especial need of 
zealous, consecrated efforts in this direction, for, in a 
district nearly twice as large as all New England, 
there are only six schools furnishing secondary in- 
struction for the colored people. Many cities in other 
Southern states have more and better schools than 
are to be found in the whole state of Florida. Estab- 
lished in 1892, this Academy has become one of the 
leading schools in the state, with over 400 students, 
and many on the waiting list. The courses are Kin- 
dergarten, Grammar, Normal, and Industrial ; and the 
institution, under the care of a. principal who is a 
worthy representative of the possibilities of his race, 
has the cordial endorsement of the leading citizens of 
Jacksonville and the state, of the Southern Education 



MISSIONS MULTIPLIED 141 

Board, and of prominent philanthropists in the North. 
The A. B. H. M. S. assists in its support, and in the 
coming year the women of New England are to have 
their share in tilling the neglected soil of Florida. As 
the Woman's American Baptist Home Mission Society 
contributes for the first time to the maintenance of a 
new teacher, the Florida Baptist Academy comes into 
the list of Our Schools and Teachers. 



WINGED WORDS 



"The nineteenth century has made the Negro free; 
the twentieth century is to make him a man." 

Victor Hugo. 

''The idea should not be simply to make men car- 
penters, but to make carpenters men." 

IV. E. B. DuBois. 

"Unless we judge every human institution by its 
best products, instead of its worst, we shall find our- 
selves far from the truth ; and this being so, who are 
we that we shall judge the products of the Almighty 
by their worst, instead of their best results ?" 

Joel Chandler Harris. 

"America is dedicated to the proposition of the 
equality of all men before the law, and must either 
solve the problem, or stultify the national conscience." 

Kelly Miller. 

"Of what avail the emancipation from legal 
slavery, if the freedman is to find even among his 
emancipators an industrial servitude none the less 
actual for being enforced outside the law? There is 
evidently need among us of a revival of a little of the 
spirit of Lincoln." Springfield Republican. 



142 LESSON IV 

"We believe that the progress of the two races 
in the South are so interwoven that whatever helps 
tlie one helps the other, and that what retards the 
progress of the one retards the progress of the other." 

National Negro Business League. 

"If anything can solve this race problem, it is the 
Gospel — the Gospel of peace on earth and good will 
to men. It is what the Lord Jesus Christ said, 'Peace, 
be still.' I have already tried to carry that Gospel be- 
yond the borders of Atlanta to other parts of the state, 
and I am going bye and bye to Alabama; and I am 
going to say, 'Let us have peace.' " 
Ex-Gov. Northen, Pres. of Bus. Men's Gospel Union. 

"I believe it is fully in the hands of the Christians 
of the United States to hasten or retard the coming 
of Christ's Kingdom by hundreds, perhaps thousands 
of years." Josiah Strong. 

"The chief obstacle to Christian missions is the 
lack of Christianity in Christians." C. K. Ober. 

''Providence has placed the Negroes here, not 
without a purpose. One object, in my opinion, is that 
the stronger race may imbibe a lesson from the 
weaker in patience, forbearance,, and childlike, yet 
supreme trust in the God of the universe. This race 
has been placed here, that the white man might have a 
great opportunity of lifting himself, by lifting it up." 

Booker T. Washington. 

"Does the Christian Church believe the Negro is 
a man? Does it believe that Christ died for him? 
Does it believe that the word of Jesus is addressed to 
him, 'Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in 
heaven is perfect'? — If that central truth of Chris- 
tianity is accepted by the churches of the country, 



MISSIONS MULTIPLIED 143 

North and South, there can be no question about the 
solution of this problem.'' Washington Gladden. 

''I have been blamed for giving so many thousand 
dollars for the benefit of colored men. But I expect 
to stand side by side with these men in the day of 
judgment. Their Lord is my Lord. They and I are 
brethren and I am determined to be prepared for that 
meeting.*' Nathan Bishop. 

WHO IS arr neighbor? 




xBOOKS WORTH READING 



1 History of the. Negro .Race in America. 

George W. Williams. 

History. of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Trade in 
America. Henry Wilson. 

The American Negro. 

William Hannibal Thonias. 

The Negro and the Nation. 

George S. Merriam. 

Travels in the Slave States. 

Frederick Law Olmsted. 

Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. 

Written by Himself. 

.Memorials of a. Southern Planter. 

Susan Dabney Smedes. 

Uncle Tom's Cabin. 

Harriet Beecher Stozve. 

Up from Slavery. 

Booker T. Washington. 

Life of Toussaint L'Ouverture. 

John Reilly Beard. 

A Residence on a Georgia Plantation. 

Fanny Kemble Butler. 

Samuel Chapman Armstrong, 

Mrs. E. H. Talbot. 

The Souls of Black Folk. 

W. E. B. DuBois. 

From Servitude to Service. 

Kelly Miller. 

'Uncle Remus. 

Joel Chandler Harris. 



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